Regina Spektor

A Moscow-born singer/songwriter, known for her quirky lyrics, Regina Spektor has quite a large range, from earworms to downright depressing ballads. Immigrating with her parents at the age of 12 to New York, something she has sung about, she has since gained a steady ground in the anti-folk scene.

In 2016 she became known to a larger audience by way of the Asian-influenced version of The Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" she recorded for the soundtrack of the film Kubo and the Two Strings.

Discography:

11:11 (2001)
Songs (2002)
Soviet Kitsch (2004)
Begin to Hope (2006)
Far (2009)
What We Saw From the Cheap Seats (2012)

Regina Spektor provides examples of the following tropes:

An Immigrant's Tale: "Rockland County" and "8th Floor" both revolve around the immigrant experience - the first is Spektor's most autobiographical song, the second a more general allegory for the Russian-American experience.
Previous Album Title Drop: "Düsseldorf", a bonus track on the deluxe version of Begin to Hope, features a reference to "Soviet kitsch".
Award Bait Song: "The Call" for Prince Caspian
Awesome McCoolname: Not only is Spektor an awesome name (it sounds like it could be a G.I. Joe villain), her brother has a song named after him. "Bear Spektor." His name is Bear Spektor.
- Unfortunately it's only a nickname. His real name's Barry.
Berserk Button: Most of Regina's songs are either quirky and adorable or balladic and depressing, but the live-only song "Ink Stains" is her only genuinely angry song, about how she wants to gas Holocaust deniers. It has some uncharacteristically gory imagery ("so who'll be the Jew to make the papers / drenched in blood up to your blue Jew eyeballs") and the song ends with an angry, emotional wail. She's also posted on her Myspace blog about her support for Israel because of how the Jews have been exploited and massacred throughout history.
Big Applesauce: New York is frequently mentioned in her songs, including locations such as the Williamsburg Bridge.
Bilingual Bonus: Both "Après Moi" and "8th Floor" contain untranslated Russian, the former featuring a poem by Boris Pasternak.
- "Après Moi" has some French (the title references and includes the famous Louis XV quote, "Après moi, le deluge"), as well.
Black Sheep Hit: "Fidelity", the only song of hers to come close to troubling the pop charts, features no piano. While not a bad song, that is her signature thing.
- Oddly enough, the music video for the single does show Regina playing the piano at several points.
Brooklyn Rage: Humourously describes herself as a "tough girl from The Bronx"
Call-and-Response Song: "Uh-Merica."
- "Hell No", as a duet with Sondre Lerche.
Cloudcuckoolander: She may be this, but seems to have her head together in interviews. She's probably just a little weird and sweet.
Cool Teacher: Her role in the video for "On the Radio" is a music teacher in an Inner-City School.
Country Music: She made a strange little trip into the genre with "Love You're A Whore." Her explanation to the crowd at the Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tennessee:

Regina: I'm from Moscow, and then the Bronx, so I'm allowed to do whatever the fuck I want!

The Cover Changes the Gender: Subverted with her cover of "Chelsea Hotel #2"; the lyrics are kept the same, despite clearly being from a male perpective.
Cover Version: Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel #2", Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", Hanna Szenes' "Halikha LeKesariya (Eli, Eli)", Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes", Madonna's "Love Profusion", John Lennon's "Real Love", and Radiohead's "No Surprises".
Cryptic Conversation: her appearance on Jenny Owen Youngs's "Voice on Tape" has her speaking on Youngs' answering machine about some Noodle Incident in an adorably Russian-accented voice. A conversation between Regina and her brother Bear appears on "Soviet Kitch" under the cryptic title "* * *".
Dream Team: Her first major tour? With the Strokes and Kings of Leon. Goddamn.
Epic Rocking: "Pavlov's Daughter" at nearly 8 minutes long. "Chemo Limo" and "Back of a Truck" are both around 6 minutes, which is still long for her.
Everything Is an Instrument: The famous percussion chair.
Good Name for A Rock Band: Talked about in "Making Records."
Hair Decorations: and sometimes she takes it Serial Escalation.
Hans Christian Andersen: Name dropped in "Prisoners," and his fairy tales have clearly influenced her Urban Fantasy stories.
Headphones Equal Isolation: Mentioned in the song "Eet": You ease in your headphones / to drown out your mind...
Heartbeat Soundtrack: "Ode To Divorce," before the piano kicks in.
Homage: The music video for "Us" is an homage to the silent film Le Locataire Diabolique by Georges Meliés.
Indecipherable Lyrics - Done intentionally on "A Cannon", which has a couple lines of a sort of gibberish whisper. Though, it could qualify as Singing Simlish.
Ironic Nursery Tune: her version of "Mockingbird" degenerates into a story of a poor father desperately trying to connect with his daughter.
Keep Circulating the Tapes: More than two thirds of her catalogue is unavailable on her CDs - the rest exists only as live bootlegs and studio demos that she appears to be fine with, with one exception - her 1999 Demo. Also, her first album, 11:11, is only available as a (legit) digital download.
- Songs was also only ever legally available from an online indie music store (which, thankfully, is still going), and her concerts.
Lighter and Softer: Begin to Hope and Far lost some of the harder edge found in her older songs. It's a far cry from her 1999 demo tapes, in which she actually used the word "cunt."
- And then she wrote "Ink Stains" (Regina Spektor meets Inglourious Basterds) and covered Radiohead's depressing "No Surprises." The darkness is back.
Literary Allusion Title: "Samson" is based on the Biblical story and contains many references to it.
- Then there's the bonus track "Baobabs", using imagery from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince.
Lonely Piano Piece: several of her songs convey loneliness, with only a piano and voice. "Somedays," "Summer in the City," "Just Like the Movies" and "Making Records" come to mind.
Long Title: Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories by Regina Spektor, a compilation album of pre-Begin To Hope songs.
- There's also her song "The Left-Hand Song (A Lesson In How Fleeting Preservation Is)"
Lyrical Dissonance: "Two Birds" and her song with Ben Folds, "You Don't Know Me".
Magical Realism: Many of the stories told in her lyrics feature Magical Realism traits (especially the album 11:11) and her live-only song "The Bronx" name drops the genre.
Matzo Fever
Measuring the Marigolds: "Loveology" and "The Calculation" are both about how love cannot be calculated.
Melismatic Vocals: Especially in Dance Anthem of the 80s, in which she takes us on a Middle Eastern folk music inspired melismatic ride up and down the word "sleep."
Mood Dissonance: "That Time". "Hey, remember that time when you OD'd?"
- "Hey, remember that other time when you OD'ed for the second time?"
Murder Ballad: She and Levon Vincent's surreal version of the old murder ballad "Twa Sisters."
- "Mary Ann" is a particularly weird one.
The Musical: Her upcoming "Beauty," an adaptation of "Sleeping Beauty."
Oedipus Complex: Her song "Oedipus."
Older Than They Look: You would be forgiven for thinking that Spektor is younger than 32.
Old Shame: She may feel this way about some songs, they way she talks about her own work, but her true old shame is her appearance in the super-obscure film Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control, which she has never, ever mentioned in interviews.
One of Us: Her intelligence and nerdy love of classical literature aside, one particular interlude between songs sticks out. Forgetting her toothbrush on a trip to California, Regina, ever the optimist, reveled in the opportunity to buy a child's toothbrush (as she calls it, "travel sized") featuring Superman. And she dressed as Zorro during a Halloween show.
Our Mermaids Are Different: "Mermaid," as it's a retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen tale in an Urban Fantasy setting. She mentions that the painful stabbing feeling in her feet causes her to bleed. She claims to have sold her voice for, among other things, a bottle of gin and a bump of cocaine before the narrative goes completely off the rails.
Perpetual Smiler: She's almost always smiling when she's not singing; she's about as close as you can get to this trope in real life. It's a warm smile, unlike most examples, and it gets even more heartwarming if you hang around Russians and know that they usually don't smile unless they're genuinely happy or excited.
Repurposed Pop Song: Microsoft used her song "Us" to promote one of their projects, despite the fact that it's partially about the fall of the Soviet Union and contains such lines as "We're living in a den of thieves" and "It's contagious." Was the "we are a crumbling Evil Empire" vibe really what Microsoft was going for?
Rummage Sale Reject: In a good way; her outfits appear to be put together by spinning through a Greenwich Village vintage store.
Shout-Out: To Tom Waits in "Prisoners" (compare it to his song "9th & Hennipen"), Patti Smith in "Poor Little Rich Boy" with the repeated "so goddamn young", Boris Pasternak in "Après Moi," and about a hundred literary references, from Andersen to Margaret Atwood to Virginia Woolf to Edith Wharton's Ethan Fromm. A darker, more ambiguous one is to the famous antisemitic poet Ezra Pound in a song named either "Ezra Pound" or "If You're Never Sorry." She is the Umberto Eco of pianists.
Signature Song: "Fidelity" is her best-known, but "Samson" is quite popular too.
Single Woman Seeks Good Man: The plot of the "Fidelity" video.
Singing Simlish: She often uses vocal exercises such as lip buzzing as part of her songs.
Smart Girl: As evidenced by this interview.
Socially Awkward Hero: She often comes off as being shy, reserved and somewhat socially awkward in interviews and public appearances, something that her fans find to be extremely cute.
- Her shyness is on full display in her 2007 CBS Sunday Morning segment.
Something Blues: "2.99¢ Blues"
Song of Song Titles: "On the Radio" references Guns N' Roses' "November Rain", and "Edit" namechecks The Beatles' "Dr. Robert" and Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey".
Stealth Pun: Prone to these - even Visual Puns, such as the boa boa.
Strange Girl
The Something Song: "Hotel Song", "Sailor Song".
Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: She wears a lot of dresses, bows, and girly hair clips.
Title-Only Chorus: "Aching to Pupate".
What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs? - "Pavlov's Daughter".
You Have to Have Jews: Well, she is from New York.