Phil Rosenthal: Good morning, David. David Wild: Good morning, friend of rapper Ray Romano. PR: Yeah, can you believe this? Let's play a little bit of this thing that happened. Are you ready? [Clip of Ray Romano rapping "8 Mile"] PR: All right. What do you think of that? DW: I think Eminem is right scared. PR: What do you call it when you appropriate the appropriator? DW: Yes, exactly. PR: But aren't you impressed with his skills and also... DW: His mad skills? PR: Not to mention the memorization. DW: Listen, I watched him on your show and then Parenthood and Men of a Certain Age becoming a great actor. PR: And now he's a great rapper. DW: Exactly. PR: Very proud of Ray. DW: Yes. PR: I'm also very proud of you, David, because you, the best thing about doing this besides the fact that I hate to admit it, but I like you is that you've turned me on to such great musicians and actually allowed me to meet them in person and fall in love with them, not just for their music, but for their character, their personalities and who they are. And I have to be honest, I never listened to our guest today. I just was unaware of her as I am unaware of a lot of music. And you've turned me on to some great stuff. And I have to say Regina Spektor is now one of my favorites. DW: And I have to tell you that I have never met Regina Spektor. No, I have been a fan since Tom Petty of all people. His daughter, Adria, directed and was a key collaborator to Regina on her early work. PR: Right. DW: He was the first person to tell me, he goes, David, this Regina Spektor is amazing. Yeah, I have been a fan ever since. But she, her people, when they put out, they've reissued five of her albums. PR: Yes. DW: And she's on her tour this summer, the Midsummer Daydream tour right now. And they said they suggested she should be on the show. And I was like, oh, my God, I've always wanted to talk to her. PR: Great. DW: Such a fan. Such an interesting story because yeah, this is, you know, a young lady who grew up in Moscow until she was nine came to New York. And has become one of the great sort of artists of her. PR: Yes, singer, songwriter. DW: Yes. PR: Yeah. Just great. So I'm thrilled to talk to her. We're talking to her on Zoom today and... DW: Riverside, something different. PR: Oh, yeah, that's right. It's not Zoom. It's something called Riverside, which I've used in some of my interviews. I guess the quality is a little better? People, you can tell us. Yes, you tell us. How do I look like? DW: You look like you can rap not as well as... PR: I cannot. I'm going to have to get his secret for rapping. DW: But let's get to know an artist we both love. This is for Naked Lunch. This is our summer of Spektor and let's get to meet Regina Spektor. [MUSIC - "Naked Lunch Theme"] [MUSIC - "Fidelity"] PR: How are you doing, Regina? What a pleasure to meet you. We're both big fans. Regina Spektor: So good to meet you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm a big fan as well. PR: Oh, sweet. We have a couple of things in common. DW: Yes. First is Riverdale. RS: Oh! PR: So I lived there from the time I was two to the time I was nine. I lived on Netherland Avenue. Where did you live? RS: Of course, of course. I live, I came to Kingsbridge Avenue. PR: Great. RS: I don't know if you know it's right by the subway. It's down the hill. PR: You went to the Academy there? RS: Yes. PR: Yeah. RS: Yes. It was where I learned English and Hebrew at the same time. PR: And what did you like better? RS: What? PR: What did you like better? RS: Well, I could start reading Hebrew faster because it was kind of a simpler way to sound it out. PR: Oh, yeah. RS: Because it didn't have all the like walk, talk, all the like sneaky things that are pronounced different. It's it's exactly as it's written. PR: Yeah. RS: But ultimately I speak better English. [laughs] PR: I learned Hebrew too. Did you have to go to Hebrew school and learn Hebrew at all? DW: I did. In fact, I grew up in Teneffly, New Jersey, not far from another period of your life right after. By the way, you came from Moscow at nine. Moscow on the Hudson to which a movie that has more significance, I think for you. RS: Yes. SW: But you came when, I'm from New Jersey and you did some time studying in in in New Jersey. Is that right? RS: Yeah, I went to Fairlawn High for a year and a half. DW: I apologize for New Jersey. I don't know if... RS: I love New Jersey. SW: I know when I went as a teen tour as a kid to Israel, I was in the middle of the the desert. And there were these poor kids selling like soft drinks to people like in a they had no ice. They had no anything and they stopped. We stopped. They were the greatest kids and they said, where are you from? I said, New Jersey. And they went, New Jersey and pointed at me laughing. And I'm like, there is literally no place in the world where New Jersey is not a punchline, unfortunately. RS: I know where it's like when I traveled and I told people I was from the Bronx, they'd be like, show me your scars. [laughs] PR: Yeah, they don't know that Riverdale is nicer than most places in the United States. RS: Even Kingsbridge, which is like right under under it is is really great. DW: Yeah. And by the way, you've shown your scars in a series of albums now that have like, you know, your great artistry by showing your scar. RS: My emotional scars. PR: Exactly. Have you been back to Moscow? RS: I've I've had the chance one time. Yeah. And for all I know, it might be the one and only time because I'm not heading there. Not going there anytime soon. PR: When were you there last? RS: I was there. I went there with my record Cheap Seats and I went there in 2012. And it was the most incredible feeling. It was just part of a European tour. PR: Right. RS: But somehow the way that these things work out and and and life gives you these little poetic moments even when you don't realize it's going to happen. My booking agent who booked the tour booked Vienna right after the Moscow show. And that literally was I went from the same airport that I went as a nine year old refugee to Vienna, which was the first stop. Because Soviet refugees at the time that I left had to go to Austria, then stop, then they looked at our x-rays of our lungs and they did some interviews with our parents. And then we went onwards to Italy. And then it was just sort of open ended and people some people waited there for a couple of weeks. Some people waited there for a year. So you just kind of lived in Italy in these, you know, amazing little sort of tiny communities within the larger community of Italy. So we would go to we lived in Lodispoli and and it was just a bunch of Soviet Jews waiting to to get interviewed. And we lived in an apartment with many, many families per room. Each family lived in a room and and we just we would go to the free beach. We would sort of we would we would buy the cheapest food there was, which is like, I think frozen turkey wings, which they named the, you know, Soviet wings or something like, everything became a joke. And we would sell things to the on the in the in the market that we had brought out. Like, I know my dad brought some Melodia LPs and we brought tablecloths and sort of like little chachkies and like... SW: Soviet kitsch. RS: Yes, exactly. We could maybe, you know, maybe. Oh, hello. PR: We don't know who that is. RS: No, it was a mystery. But but it was it was sort of this for I think for our parents, extremely stressful and for us, extremely adventurous and fun experience, you know, immigration. PR: I know that kids kids can make fun anywhere. RS: Yes. PR: But Italy must have been felt like a paradise to you. Do you ever see that movie? Hope and Glory? RS: No. PR: I want to recommend that to you. It's by John Boorman, who's done a lot of great films. But it was about his childhood during the London Blitz. And even though it was war and you could get killed at any time and he he and his friends would have so much fun every morning, they would wake up and there was a new rubble to play in. RS: Right, right. I mean, that I could I could absolutely see that it's like it's like having exploring the insides of apartments that you never get the chance to go into otherwise. PR: That it's one of the best movies I've ever seen about that kind of experience. Your parents are worried, sick and struggling and you get to have, you know, a childhood still. RS: Yeah, I found out later that my dad had this nightmare for months and months. Already after coming to America even where he would wake up and he would be back in Moscow and he would have no idea how to get back out and how to how to get any of the papers that that we'd gotten or anything. And he would just wake up in a cold sweat over and over for months and months. PR: It's a trauma. RS: Yeah, yeah. RS: What was life like in Moscow? Do you remember it? RS: I mean, I remember. I think I I remember a lot of it. It's it's hard for me because I think I'm sort of so much of my how do I say this? Like my relationship to to reality and imagination is kind of it's ever so flowing. So especially as a kid, I definitely I have very, very vivid memories whether or not they're exactly as things happened. I think that probably not because even when we went back, you know, my mom came on that tour and it was so amazing. We went and and revisited all the places from my childhood and and I went to some new places I'd never been, and I wish we went to my old neighborhood. Yeah. And I and I looked at it with my mom and I said, oh my god, this has become so run down. Like it had this. It just looked like a Fellini film in my mind, in my memory. And she said, wow, they've really fixed this place up. [laughs] That was I think the moment where I was like, OK, so maybe. But you know, in a lot of ways, you know, kind of like a Fellini's film, Amarcord. PR: Yes, I love that. And how that's I love that film so much. But do you remember that scene where there's snow banks and they're like as tall as they're walking through the I actually have that memory because because we would just have so much snow. And it would fall like in it would fall in in, I would say, October or November. And then it would just last till April. And what was interesting is because it would be just layers and layers and more and more would build up. PR: Yes. RS: When it was melting, it was like an archaeological discovery of like all the dog poop and like everything just everything that had been accumulated. But we had so much snow to play with and build with and we would have to sort of just nobody took it away. They just got added to. So whenever there would be really big snows, all the grown ups would go outside and they would sort of make these slides out of snow, life size slide, like in a playground with rails with packed snow. And then they would pour water just over the slide that you slide down. So then we could just climb up all winter long and then slide down. And yeah, there's just a lot of these. All our summers were spent in Estonia. So we went to we went a lot to like Tallinn and actually on a tour I went, I've played Tallinn a few times. And again, my memories of it were so different. PR: Sure. RS: But I think also it's a different time. Like even when I went back in 2012, I was talking to one of the security and she was saying that she was just a young woman, like 21 years old. And she had a young teenage brother and she was saying, yeah, and you know, when it snows, nobody plays outside anymore. Everyone's just at home on their phones or video consoles and just... PR: Just basically kind of like exactly like here. RS: But I just it was so to me it was just such an interesting thing where on the one hand, we're all trying to sort of, you know, reach everybody and kind of connect. On the other hand, all this individuality of places is disappearing and just becoming homogeneous. Like it was really cool that Estonia was really different from Moscow and Moscow was really different from Tokyo and from New York. Like that's the fun of it. If you're just going like this everywhere, then it's just all the same. DW: Well, it's interesting Regina. I don't know if Phil does a show, you know, where he goes around the world, somebody feed Phil where he's all these places and their unique qualities to the people. But he also did a movie called Exporting Raymond, because I don't know if you know he created the show, Everybody loves Raymond. RS: Yes. RS: And Exporting Raymond, which I love, he took it to Russia and worked with the Russian broadcasting world to translate his show. And it's an amazing for me. It was just like because the subject of Russia, you know, is such a big one. And it really brought it home for me in a way. PR: I was there in 2009 filming that came out in 2011. But Russia, I saw the Moscow that I saw the center of the city. You must have seen a great difference from when we were a kid to coming back. The center of the city was like now a great well off European city. RS: Because I lived so so on the outskirts. I sort of like lived in the Bronx of Moscow. You know, I've always been a borough girl, I guess. But I just, I feel like the few times that I'd gone in were, I went only to the most impressive places. And to me, at that age, it was stunning. PR: Did your folks take you to the ballet? RS: Yeah, I went to the I went to the ballet. I went to the Bolshoi. I actually saw a terrifying opera that at the one and only opera I'd seen live till many, many years later in America. And it was, it was called Havan Shina. And it was all about these two different sects of Christians murdering each other because one of them wanted to cross themselves with two fingers. And that was the old people. And the other ones wanted to cross themselves with three fingers. And there was like a lot of fire and huts burning and it really captured me. It was Mussorgsky. But, yeah. PR: Luckily, we don't have stupid conflicts like that anymore. [laughs] RS: [laughs] Right. That's all in the past. They did have, they did have a lot of, they had this fortune teller who could drop, drip wax, hot wax into water and read that. And that really made a huge impression on me. Just, yeah, it's a really, it's a really beautiful opera, but I was definitely too young to see it. I was probably like seven or eight. But, you know, my kindergarten graduation though really kind of freaked me out because as a present for graduating kindergarten, which you graduated at six in Russia, it was like a year later than here. We got taken to the mausoleum of Lenin, of Grandpa Lenin. And, Dедушка Ленин was, so we, first of all, at the time, it was a fascinating scene because all the Russians had to sort of wait. And the first people who got to kind of freely go in were all the visitors, all the tourists. So they got to experience the real, so you would have tourists from all over the world, and they would bring flowers and, you know, people from other communist countries, or, you know, would just be very excited. So by the time it was time for my kindergarten class to go, we were, you know, there's these guys with bayonets and there's a long, and it's the mausoleum is dark stone, you know, kind of, and it's just a long sort of dark rectangle you walk into. PR: Lenin's tomb, yeah. RS: Yeah. And then there's alongside this thing, there's dudes with bayonets all around, and I was, and they basically say, don't step out of line, don't touch anything. So I was sure that I would like trip and some guy would like spear me. [laughs] So, so I was just like, you know, and then you get there and the reward is that you get to see this dead yellow man in a suit just on a stone slab. Fun for the kids. Super fun. Wow. That's rough. Yeah. So, so it was kind of different than growing up here. Yeah. But, but I, so like, but to me, everything looked beautiful, right, that I, that I'd experienced. But it's just that when I came, I saw how modern everything, I mean, we never had anything like stores with things in them. You know, like they could just buy. Little things like that. You know. [MUSIC - "Samson"] DW: I want to get to your music, but one more question about childhood. Just as a parent yourself now, when you think of Ilya and Bella, and their collaboration makes all of your artistic career possible, your parents, when you think of them making the leap and coming here and the world that opened up for you, as a parent now, how do you interpret it? How do you make sense of it? RS: I mean, the amount of gratitude that I feel is indescribable. And I felt it from the very, very beginning. I think as I have grown, I've understood how hard it was. I really just, they kept, you know, that's kind of the sort of the benefit and the privilege of well taken care of kids is that you're sheltered. You're really sheltered from most things like that. But I think because I was always sort of sneaky and interested in what the adults were talking about or, you know, I was always listening in on all the kitchen conversations. So I was privy to a lot of their struggle. And in Russia, it was struggle about, you know, all of the Soviet stuff and obviously the Jewish stuff. I mean, it was really not fun to be a Jew in Russia. I still find out stories all the time. I just found out a story about my mom's sister that she had been this really brilliant engineer. And when she graduated, she would go and and go and interview for a position and they would say, Oh my God, thank God you're here. We really, really need this position filled. You're perfect. And then she would come the next day and to really get a job, you had to bring your papers, your documents, and they would open her passport. And under number five, you know, it always said Jew on every Jewish person's passport. It had it was stamped in there. And they would say, Oh, Oh, hold on one second. I'm sorry. I just and they would go off into some back room. And sometimes some of the people came out and it was this unspoken thing where they would feel really bad doing this. And other times they felt just fine doing it. And other times there was contempt in their eyes, but they all would say, Oh, actually, you know, it was a misunderstanding. We don't actually have a job. I'm so sorry. And she did this for a long, long, long time. And she just could not get a job. And that was such a common experience. And that was just one of the million different ways that my what my parents had to deal with that I, you know, they took me out of there so that I wouldn't have to deal with it. And as far as being a parent right now, you know, it's interesting because I'm watching what's going on, you know, here in my home country, as far as, you know, the Jewish people are concerned. And I would, I would be, I would be lying if I didn't say I was in shock. PR: Yep. RS: Because this was the good place, you know, this was the place you come to, to, to sort of be a free Jew. And I never thought I never gave a second thought to wearing my star of David on a subway, let alone on on my own record covers, you know, and like, and whatever. And when I think about my children, my next thought is, you know, are they, you know, depending on how the wind blows, are they going to have to learn a new language? You know, are they going to have to do what I did and go somewhere else if things get really bad? And only time will tell, you know, only, only time will tell if people are okay, going down this road yet again, and again and again. PR: You know, I'm listening to you and of course, it's sad that you should feel this way. But at the same time, you are so not alone. In fact, we meaning immigrants, I'm the first generation American, my parents survived the Holocaust to come here. We are a nation of immigrants. Most of the country is immigrants, either first or second generation immigrants. There's many more of us than them. And that is the hope that I keep. RS: Yeah. DW: Now that we have confronted the horror of our times, I'm going to turn to the joy of music. And I want to, I want to tell you the way I, and when we began the preview for this, the little intro of this episode, Phil thanked me because I get to introduce him. He introduces me to so many people, but I introduced him to a lot of great musicians. And I had to confess, we've never met, which is, but I first heard about you. I can remember the moment I heard about you, because it was by hearing it directly from Tom Petty, who, you know, I wrote about your cover story in night when I moved out here in '91. And then he sort of adopted me into the, you know, his home at that point. And, but I, I think in one of the later conversations after, you know, many years later, he was bragging, so proud of Adria, his daughter, and how she was working with a great young artist. And Tom, I don't know, you worked with Tom, you toured with Tom. Tom was not a bullshit artist. If he loved, if he said he loved your music, he loved your music. And I wonder, you know, what was it meaningful for you to not only have the genius of Adria as a sort of video maker and artistic collaborator, but to have the, you know, to be embraced by an artist like Tom Petty? RS: Oh, it was honestly just, it hurts in a good way to even like talk about him and that time, because it was just so magical. And I, I just can't believe that he's gone. And I think that we all could have used his wisdom and his insight, you know, but it was so amazing. It was just, yeah, it was, it was magical. It was like, it was, it was, it was a world I really didn't know about, you know, in a lot of ways, even just getting signed, coming out to California. It's this whole other universe that no one in my family, no one, I knew nobody in the music industry or any kind of thing. Like it was just all sort of, it was all so new. And I was also very, very, I had these huge holes in my education. Like I didn't, I found out about Tom through Adria the first time that I looked at a Tom Petty record, I said, oh my god, he looks so much like you. Because even though of course later I realized how much of that music had been sort of just in the, in the, in the, in the earth that I was walking on, you know, it was, it was played in every store. It was played on radios. It was in films. It was in, but I didn't grow up. I sort of grew up in what I call the immigrant bubble, which is when you live in the country, but you eat your own food, you don't have money to buy records or go to the movies or go to see Broadway or go to see anything. Like, you know, when I played on Broadway, I had a residency on Broadway, people are, what does it mean to you to be on Broadway? It was like, I don't know. PR: Like, it's exciting. It's exciting. RS: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was like, I get it. You know, it was fun to be on in a playbill. Right. Because, you know, anytime my parents could get enough money, we'd go to Carnegie Hall or go to, you know, go to a classical concert or something. But it wasn't, it wasn't that thing that I knew. I mean, I found out about David Bowie when Goldie and Seymour put, when I was still in the process of being signed. DW: That's Seymour Stein, who formed Sire Records and Michael, RS: And Michael Goldstone. DW: Who signed you to the label. RS: Yeah. Yeah. Like, they made me a little iPod and they filled it with music. And it was really, I mean, honestly, going to those record different record labels and rating their closets. DW: Oh, yes. RS: I'm familiar with that. When they were like, come sign with us. And then, you know, here's a closet full of things. And then they would mail me, you know, they, yeah, it is. And they would get, they would get me, you know, like a whole box of CDs or something to send it back home to New York, because I couldn't even carry it in my luggage. It was so heavy. I would take everything. I would take the entire everything. And so, and, and that's kind of how I got my music like education. And I was already, you know, 24 when I was doing that. So it's kind of late for a lot of sort of American culture. I'm still catching up on a lot, a lot of things. PR: Well, were you taking piano lessons as a little kid in Moscow? RS: Yeah, I started taking piano lessons when I was six. PR: Right. RS: And we left when I was nine and a half. And I was really, I think in a lot of ways, besides the fact that I was leaving my grandparents and some other relatives, that was the most painful thing was leaving my piano, my lessons, my teacher. You loved it. I loved it so much. I loved it. And I was like, and I practiced all the way through immigration because I would just play on a table, you know? And I would just, and windowsills, because I was so afraid to like lose my technique, whatever that means, you know, at nine and a half. But, and then I kind of missed an entire year of learning, but when I got to America, in our local synagogue, in the Bronx, like Kingsbridge Center of Israel, they had a piano in the basement. So they started letting me come and practice in the basement of the synagogue. And then my dad, one day, coming back, he was working this very, very, very low paying job in a color printing, in a film printing, photo printing place in Manhattan. And he, coming back on the subway, met this man who, with the violin case, just started up a conversation because my dad was very, very friendly, which is like, I think one of the most incredible things about him is that, even with broken English, he would just make friends with people all the time. And through that, through that man, Sam, and his wife, Sonia, I actually ended up getting free piano lessons for my entire music education till I was 17. DW: Wow. And that's, is that Sonia Vargas? Is that right? RS: Yes, Sonia Vargas. DW: I wonder, you know, because something that I've gotten involved with over the years, I think even maybe a show with Tom Petty, music education, shows supporting music education, I just wonder from your point of view, like when you think about, I think about, like when I first became a fan of yours, I didn't even know who to associate you with because I think you're such a unique talent. And like, I've sort of come to think in my head, I think the first thing I ever came up with is like, she's the perfect, you know, I know your real parents we talked about, but like musically, I think of, you're like the child of George Gershwin and Kate Bush, which is a pretty good musical marriage of geniuses. But I wonder what you think about the importance of music education. One of the millions of things that like, people are gutting arts programs, you know, music education has been gutted for years now. How short-sighted is it when like, you're, and I know like all really talented musicians, Billy Joel always said, I got one good hand. He said, I wish I had Elton, you know, people compare, but you're a real musical talent. How important is a music education to transforming lives of kids like you? RS: I think, you know, I think that music education, I think honestly, any kind of an education in the arts, any kind of a skill that you could teach somebody that can help them take something internal and make it external. So if you teach somebody writing skills, if you teach somebody poetry, if you teach somebody to walk through a museum and love paintings, that is one of the quickest ways to improve somebody's quality of life. Because all of a sudden you can have somebody who doesn't have a huge salary, doesn't have, isn't able to travel freely throughout the world and hop on a plane and go to Venice or go to this place or that place, but they could walk into any library. They could sit with a tiny instrument in their room, in a corner of a room. They could go into any museum on a free day and they will be filled. They will be filled with joy. So to gatekeep these simple things, like singing, playing, writing, painting, obviously sports, because that's like a combination of not just artistry, but embodiment. All the arts. All that stuff. You're not giving people that outlet. You're basically not taking care of your citizens because you're not giving those internal feelings and outlet. PR: Yeah, you're stifling humanity. RS: Yeah, yeah, it should be, I do think that there's this concept of shadow artists, people who have all the feeling of artists and they have all of the pull towards something, towards creating something, but they have none of the skills. So they become shadow artists because they can't express it. DW: Or critics. DW: Don't look at me when you say that. PR: But the best critics like David, they celebrate the artistry in others and that in itself is an art form too, to write about. RS: Well, it is because then you have to, but what you're also able to do is to take your internal thoughts and feelings and put them out into a piece, which is art. PR: Listen, I wouldn't be here without the after-school plays that I got to do as a kid, right? And it doesn't matter what your art form is. If you're a dancer, if you're a sculptor, you have to have that outlet. And the only way to discover it is to be exposed to it when you're young. RS: And that's the thing that people really don't understand is that we're so pliable, we're so like still, we're very much ourselves from the time that we're born. We have certain traits. But as far as like being able to be open to things or being able to kind of connect with each other, the more you give these skills like music or art or acting or writing, the more you give people the chance to connect with others. PR: Because that's like, that's why it's like the plays. Yeah, exactly. Like doing a whatever, a school musical or something. It's so precious. PR: And you get a sense of self. You get a sense of who you are and that, oh, maybe I do have something to offer the world. [MUSIC - "Don't Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas)] DW: Well, I wonder you're heading out, I think literally, as we're recording this, I think the most important thing I think in a day or two on your midsummer daydream tour. And I don't know, it's very interesting to me, you and Phil both go out and you're going out a little later, he's just, he's been on the road the last few years talking about food and travel and the world and meeting with people in great theaters like you. You did the London Palladium recently. You are doing that. PR: Yes, but I have no talent. This is a person who can sing and play and write songs. I talk a lot. DW: But I do wonder Regina, like when you go out there, do you realize that on this Daydream tour that I actually heard some, I think it was an NPR reporter interviewing you and he talked about bringing I think his daughter to see you and the idea of like there are young girls, young boys who are in that audience with their parents, hopefully being supervised, but who are out there and being so inspired by you, like to me, you're very young because you came along after I was already in music, but you're already at, having you've built this body of work, you've reissued five of your albums on vinyl that everyone, we encourage everyone to go get, start with begin to hope and then keep hoping and get all the records. But when you go out there on the road, do you ever encounter the fact that you are inspiring daydreams? RS: I honestly like, I think if I had to, within the arts, you know, if I had to pledge allegiance to like one little country within the arts themselves, it would be fiction, right? I love stories, fairy tales, myths. I love dreams. I love places where you can go and sort of take all of your very real world emotions, your personal history, anything, and then just go and jump into things that are all imagination and sort of the collective unconscious, that's my happy place. And in some ways, I feel like my songs have always been tiny little stories that you could just kind of go into and sort of hop around and I just love the fact that when I opened my eyes back up, because I ended up actually playing with my eyes closed most of the time, which is so fun on television. Everybody's always like, oh, keep your eyes open. And I'm like, you know, but I really kind of go into a world and when I emerged, the fact that there's somebody out there and they went there with me, is still one of the most magical things, I think. And especially, it is fun to kind of get to do it throughout the years because there are so many people that are like, I grew up on your music and I was thinking, how is that possible? But I guess it is. DW: Well, to show your history is deep, and talk about how your songs are stories and they're movies and they've worked their way into movies and they've also worked their way into TV. So we got a question from a friend of both of ours, really, who you were instrumental in writing the theme song for her brilliant show. PR: So let's hear a little bit of that theme song right now. [MUSIC - "You've Got Time"] PR: Here's a special message from Jenji Kohan, creator of Orange is the New Black. Jenji Kohan: Hey, Regi, my love, I'm recording this as I walk down the street in New York, wishing I were in LA with you and Phil. My question to you is how are you finding small M magic in your life these days? I know we both want big M, which sounds gross when I say that loud, but we're the little bits of magic creeping in these days. I love you so much. Talk to you soon. Bye. RS: I love you, Jenji. PR: Isn't she great? RS: Oh, yes. Talk about, I mean, that's a magical person. I mean, she's like my big M magic, you know? I think I'm not sure. I think a lot of it for me at this particular moment is in human beings, human beings that you can have a real conversation with, where I really, I think, and maybe that's also my Soviet-y, like Spidey sense background, I'm really sensitive to my ability to truly say what's on my mind freely and not feel judged, destroyed, erased, whatever. I feel like for whatever reason, our society at this particular moment is going through something where it's not allowing us, we're doing the sort of Soviet double think, where we're like, this is safe to say, this I shouldn't say, this will get taken, and that kind of a mental and emotional jail is not healthy for us. It's not good for us. So because, and I don't, I have, you know, I'm not some kind of a global social thinker in that way, but I sometimes think that maybe, maybe technology is doing some of it, maybe social media is doing some of it, maybe in general our attention spans are a certain way, so we have to have things very black and white, which is very, very Soviet. You're either with us or you're against us, you're either on the right side of history, the wrong side of history, you're either the good guy or the bad guy, and that's how witches get burned, that's how inquisitions happen, that's how everything happens, that's how you end up in the gulag, whatever. So to me, a lot of my sort of small M magic is that ability to hang out with somebody who loves me and who I love and who I trust and they trust me, and we just talk as human beings, and we don't have to worry that if we say something, the person's gonna get that cold, steely look and be like, what did you say? You know, and I think that even though it doesn't mean that we have to agree on everything, I love the place where a person could say, well, you know, I'm not sure about that actually, because I think that I love that, I love that. Because that's how we learn. Yes, and so that's sort of my magic is the nuance. I think the most punk thing you could do right now is be nuanced. It's like literally the wildest, craziest thing you could do right now. And so that's where my, and I encourage everybody to just like, if you feel yourself in that box, just wiggle a little bit, make that box a little bit bigger, find those people that you could be yourself with and empower yourself to be more and more yourself. Our culture does a good job of talking about authenticity and all that stuff, but it's not actually rewarding it. So it's one thing, and it's saying, be authentic, but it's actually, the other hand is kind of whipping you for it, you know? And so we need to reinstate it, I think, a little bit more. PR: If I could. It's so well said, and we are the hope. When the government isn't taking care of it, or us, we have to take care of us. And that's what's beautiful, that's the hope. It's what I was saying before, there's more of us. RS: Yeah, and I think that the only other thing I would just add to that, and I think it's because, again, we can't see the back of our own head as we walk down the street. This is our blind spot. The only thing that I would say is something that, again, I've noticed as such an outsider of an outsider of an outsider that I am, is that a lot of the time, we love to have that person that we blame, right? Or that entity that we blame. So we can just outsource all that to whatever, government, which is obviously failing us horrendously. But I would just add that there needs to be some kind of a mea culpa at this point. We can't just collectively just look over there and point all arrows at government and just say, you. It's like, it's us also. We're letting ourselves down because we're all jumping on each other and not letting each other be free also. It's not just coming from the outside. It's like the call is coming from inside the house. It's like. PR: Yeah. DW: And by the way, never a better excuse to play the song "Us". So we'll play a little of us right now. [MUSIC - "Us"] DW: I do have a question about like when you go on tour at this point, especially because of the way you tour, you know, it's not like, I don't think you're doing so much technological programming that you can't do what you feel like in the moment. So on a night to night basis, you now have at a very young age, a deep catalog that many people can be buying in our summer of Spektor that Phil and I are having, you know, I'm buying more vinyl so I can play it on vinyl and feel it in that way. But how do you feel what should be in the set list every day? Because I will tell you, like Phil discovering your music here in 2025. And I've been discovering it gradually ever since Tom Petty told me you were one of the next great, you know, things. But like, like for instance, Phil and I, he goes, have you heard of Becoming All Alone? And I'm like, oh yeah, that's one of my absolute favorites. PR: I love it. [MUSIC - "Becoming All Alone"] DW: How do you decide what songs go into the set every night? RS: Well, so first of all, I'm such a Luddite that like this particular tour is a solo tour. But even when I play with a band, there's not that many bells and whistles. We just play. This tour is just me and the piano and I play. The set list thing is interesting because well, one of the things that I make sure to do is I always look up and thank God for, what is it, setlist.fm or whatever. There's a website where you can see. DW: I love setlist.fm. RS: I love it. I love it. DW: It's a place where you can go, not only can you look up what your favorite artist played last night. You know, if you want to know. But I can go back for this podcast we've had on like, I think Daryl Hall, you know, all these artists who I've had to go back to my first concerts. Like the day that Laura Wharton, who I think was Russian, my first girlfriend, I went to Hall of Notes at the Palladium and you can look up the date. You can find, you know, and often you get to test your own memory. But I'm sorry, what is said? Why do you love it so much? RS: Well, I make sure, I go and I sort of make sure that if I've been practicing, because a lot of the time I sort of practice so many songs for a tour that I could pull from. And then there's always like certain songs that I'm like, okay, well, I really should play that because that'll make like maybe the majority of people happy to, if I don't play it, it might be a bummer. So then I have a few of those in the real estate. And then I have some that are like completely, nobody would be expecting that and that's kind of fun to throw in. And then I always just make sure that I look at what I played last time I was there. And then I'm like, oh, well, I played that last time I'm not going to play it this time I'm going to play something, you know, like a lot of the time I sort of, even though of course it's all imaginary, especially like, you know, my tour starts in San Francisco and I just didn't play it. I did that just because it's the first show so I, I made a little list of that and then I was like, but that was three years ago. Like what if it's the kind of dramatic, you know, it's not like they're coming to like a weekly residency and I'm like, oh, I shouldn't play that I played that last week. But but it is kind of like an energetically wise like a nice thing to do it's because then you're like, okay, this is what I was feeling. A lot of it is just very sort of spontaneous. As a matter of fact, I make a set list every show and I have never once been able to follow my set list ever. And even when I play with a band, I have a little tiny microphone off of my microphone to the side. Yeah. And I have a little, little button that I could step on to speak just into the in ears of my crew. And if I know that it's like a song that needs like a certain kind of lights, it'll really throw them if I just start playing it. I just whisper whatever it is or to the band because then they could hear me. PR: You call an audible. And do you, do you ever do covers too? RS: Almost never because honestly, they're so it's easier for me to write a new song than to figure my way into a cover. I have, I have done covers in the past, but... DW: You sang, you sang two covers with a friend of mine, Jakob Dylan for the Echo in the Canyon. One which was a song everybody will, I think, or most old hippies will know Buffalo Springfield song "Expecting to Fly". But you did a song by Love, the group Love, which is a little less known now. And I absolutely love. PR: Wait, Theodora. That's a cover. RS: Theodosia. PR: Theodosia. Yes. From Hamilton. [MUSIC - "Dear Theodosia"] RS:: That was when when Lin was putting together the mixtape. He's actually a rare person that I, we became friends from the internet. Like I just wrote about how much I liked seeing Hamilton at the public. And then he, he contacted me and then he's like, do you want to be on, I'm going to make a mixtape. Then of course the mixtape became like crazy. Like it. But at the time, I think I was like the first person on the mixtape. DW: Oh, that's awesome. And by the way, I saw something online where he goes in, he plays "On the Radio", your song, and basically cops to like how influenced, you know, slash might have ripped off slightly. Oh, a little of your music. And he, it's interesting to watch. He's a genius. I think we all can agree. PR: And Regina, there might be some money there. [MUSIC - "On the Radio"] DW: Will you, are like deep songs like that all the one song I love is "Genius Next Door", which, you know, you did on the Far record with Jeff Lynne, who I have worked with, done like liner notes and stuff with him over the years. He just had to cancel his big Hyde Park farewell show, which is heartbreaking. But I found the most like, again, you, you have such an interesting view into music. And I think it's reflected in how interesting your music is. But if I remember correctly, you asked to work with Jeff Lynne, not knowing yellow or Jeff Lynne's career. You knew that he produced Tom Petty record that you and I, one of our and we're only two of the only people who are obsessed with Highway Companion, which. Oh my God, raised my kids in carpools, driving them to that record. And, and, but is it true that you basically said, yeah, there's someone named Jeff Lynne who did this record, and you didn't know who he was. And yet you got to work with him. RS: Yeah, so this was this was like a, this again, that that's part of that immigrant bubble, just like accidental ignorance, not purposeful at all. But, you know, before doing a record, like, people, you know, there are a lot of people, there's a lot of musicians who are there basically like half musician, half A&R person, like they're just so smart. They know everything they know what's on what label they know all the history of music, like they'll be like, ooh, like, like, even names of record labels didn't mean anything to me. Like, they'd be like, Oh, Columbia or this or that, you know, they just be like, what, you know. And, and, and, but before doing a record, I mean, this was very early because this was sort of like my second proper signed record after Begin to Hope. And there was this kind of conference call. And, and they wanted to know, like, who are some of the producers I'm interested to work with and I was like, I was like, I don't, I don't know producers. But I'd been listening to Highway Companion all the time. So I literally like ran over to this and opened the jacket. I'm like, Oh, it's Jeff. It's this guy, Jeff Lynne. So on the call, I'm like, Well, what about this guy, Jeff Lynne, and there's just silence, silence on everybody just get I guess we can, I guess we can ask. Kim, I mean, it would be, I don't know. I mean, he, and then, and I basically found out he like only worked like with the Beatles. And, and so I was like, Okay, you know, and they're like, and they basically prepared me they're like, he's probably going to say no, you know, he just doesn't. And, and he said yes. [MUSIC - "Genius Next Door"] RS: And I loved working with him. And it was one of those things like, when I decided to do Far, it had been so many years just touring, touring, touring, I was like, okay, this is my chance. I treated producing as sort of like, like, like master classes. So I was like, I'm not going to just work with one producer, I'm going to work with a bunch of producers. So I could take a class with each one and learn how they hear and how they experience music and all the stuff was super fun. So, so, so when I worked with Jeff, it was just incredible because not only are his stories amazing and he's amazing. And so funny, so funny... DW: So dry and so funny. You know, we've taken, we don't want to go over our time with you, but I want to say that, like, I've got to watch him in his little side room of his house, making these amazing records by himself in large measure. I realize some people are musically so talented they are. He is an orchestra and you're an orchestra. That's why I encourage everyone to go out on this tour. If you can see Regina, see Regina get the records on vinyl because really you are such a unique talent and I'm so happy. I finally got to, you know, got to actually meet you. PR: When is she in LA? DW: She's not on LA on this tour. We're going to beg her to add a date. PR: What's wrong with us? DW: We can go to San Francisco. Let's go to San Francisco. RS: Come to San Francisco. I was, next time I come to LA, please come to my show. I'd love that so much to have you. Alright, and we'll take you to dinner. RS: Yes. Yes, I love that. PR: Where's the best Russian food in America that you found? And do you cook Russian food for the kids? RS: I do. I cook a lot of Russian food. PR: I loved it in Moscow. I thought the food was great. And it all surprisingly goes very well with vodka. RS: I know what it's going to say, I spent the entire time so drunk. It was insane. It was like cold borscht, pickles, herring, vodka. Over and over. Keep it coming. PR: I mean, just the ice cold cabbage, pickled cabbage with vodka is one of the great pairings in the world. RS: What did you think? So one of my favorites, sort of like Russian food pickles is the pickled watermelon. PR: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. RS: And you can't find it anywhere. PR: It's so cheap, right? It's peasant cuisine and it's phenomenal. RS: Yeah. RS: What was the food that you tasted there that you were just like, like I've never heard of this thing before? PR: Oh, that's a good question. PR: Well, just that, the cabbage and the vodka, that was like a revelation because you would never imagine. It just sounds like, is this all you get to eat here, right? I heard things were bad, but... And then it's like, oh, I get it. RS: Yeah. I feel like another secret weapon of Russian food is dill. People really underestimate the power of dill. It's like you just add a little dill. PR: It was my mom's favorite thing. DW: That's the title of your next record, the power of dill. The power of dill. RS: [laughs] DW: Thank you, Regina, so much. PR: Regina, you're just so charming and great and in addition to being so super talented, we love you. RS: Thank you. And we can't wait to see you in person. RS: Yes, me too. Thank you so much for speaking with me.