Charlie Rose: Regina Spektor is here. The Russian-born singer-songwriter has been called her generation's Joni Mitchell. She is equal parts whimsical storyteller and classically trained pianist. Tom Petty called her one of the most talented musicians alive today. Her 7th album finds Spektor returning to her musical roots. It is called Remember Us to Life. Rolling Stone says the album is full of brilliant underdog songs. Here is Regina Spektor performing "Older and Taller" in our studio.

[MUSIC - "Older and Taller"]

CR: I'm pleased to have Regina Spektor at this table for the first time. Welcome. 

Regina Spektor: Thank you, Charlie. 

CR: It's good to have you here. 

RS: I'm so glad to be here. I just love you and the show very much. 

CR: Thank you so much. We're honored to have you here. Thank you. And congratulations on this.

RS: Thank you. 

CR: Quite something. Does the reference to Joni Mitchell please you? 

RS: Oh, very much so. Yeah. That's I mean, to me, it's she's one of the most incredible and unique musicians. And when I discovered her music, it actually gave me the realization that I could maybe try and write some songs too. Because I think in my mind, it was sort of relegated, because I loved so many bands like the Beatles or Queen or the Moody Blues, and then there were the Russian bard singers like Vladimir Vysotsky and Okudzhava and Galich. It was all these men, and for some reason, I just thought, I don't know what I thought, but I didn't think that I should be writing songs. 

CR: Tell us about your musical journey, you know, from Russia to the US.

RS: Well, I think that my my journey has a lot to do with kind people who decided to help because both my parents are artists and artistic and they really believed in, you know, share art, share classical concerts, music was always playing in the house, and they decided to teach me music. And even though my mom was a piano teacher, she really thought that it would be better for me to study with a separate teacher because then you don't have this kind of oppressive childhood where your parent is your teacher and they know what you should be doing. And so she was able to help, you know, and I had an amazing teacher in Moscow. As a matter of fact, that was really the only thing that was kind of holding my parents back when they wanted to immigrate to to America was knowing that I probably wouldn't learn, music anymore.

CR: From the same teacher. 

RS: From the same teacher or maybe at all because, you know, I mean, you have to pay for music education and nobody spoke the language and they really didn't know what kind of life they were going to have here. Now that I'm an adult, I see what they were facing and it's just it's just, it's mind boggling to me, the strength you have to have to leave your country, leave your language, to start a better life for your children. 

CR: Leave everything.

RS: Everything. All your things. I mean, they, you know, the piano that I played on, we had to leave. I didn't have a piano for for years after that. And the reason why I was able to continue my studies is that, my we moved to the Bronx, and my father took a night job and he was coming home on the subway back to our neighborhood in Kingsbridge and there was a man on the train who was older and he had a violin case next to him and my dad had played violin, and they started a conversation because my dad is very much a people's person and he loves to know people's stories. And the man invited us all to to their house, to him and his wife's house, to hear some classical music being played because my dad mentioned that we hadn't heard concerts in a long time and we didn't we weren't really going to because that's not what we had the money to be spending on tickets, you know.So when we went to their house, I asked Sonia Vargas and the gentleman was Samuel Marder, I asked her to be my teacher and she said, of course. And that's really the reason why I was able to study music from the age of 10 and onwards and have the the the skills. 

CR: And what did you want to be? And what did you want to do? 

RS: Well, this is interesting because it's when I was really little, I kept saying I wanted to be a composer. And it was explained to me by very nice common sense people that it's very hard to be a composer and you have to be brilliant to be a composer, but you could be a classical pianist if you want to and you could play brilliant people's work. And then somewhere along that line, I stopped saying composer and I started saying that I wanted to be a classical pianist. Except when I hit that teenage, the teenage years, the thing that I I hadn't realized was that more than your love of music, your emotions, your your desperate need to play, you also had to have a talent for a certain kind of work ethic and that work ethic is a talent in itself and I didn't have it when it came to sitting those hours and hours. And there's that, it's like the plane taking off. You have to reach that certain kind of speed to become a classical musician, which is basically an Olympian of music, and I couldn't reach it because I wanted to, you know, scribble thoughts in a notebook.

CR: You wanted to write songs. 

RS: I didn't know it yet, but I Yeah. I wanted to write songs. I wanted to write poetry. I wanted to read books as opposed to sit and practice.

CR: So how did you get to where you are so that Tom Petty and everybody else thinks that you're so terrific? 

RS: Well, I was always humming to myself and singing to myself and singing a lot in the shower and just, I didn't realize I was doing it. And then I went on this trip as a teenager to Israel on a scholarship. And the trip was basically for for teenagers that were interested in the arts and interested in discovering more about their cultural heritage and I was always, since coming to America, I was very interested in learning about my Jewish heritage because it had been so forbidden in Soviet Russia. And so, when we got to America, I went to yeshiva and I learned about the holidays and it was just another part of figuring out my people's story. And when I went there, hiking in the desert was so difficult that I guess I was singing a lot to myself as I was hiking. And so all these kids started kind of hiking around me, and they said, you know, you have a really good voice and you should try and write songs and you should learn an instrument. And that was sort of, I think I'm one of those people that takes me, like, to the very obvious, obvious thing, and that's when I started to try and write songs when I got back to New York. 

CR: And you still play the piano? 

RS: Yeah. No. I love playing and I love writing. All these songs are have been written in the last few years. All my previous albums have spanned sometimes 10 years of picking songs from yesterday and from, you know, 10 years earlier, and they've been mixed. This is all new work. And it's really hard to analyze your own work, but I felt like these songs needed to be together because I felt like I was changing, and I was sort of in some strange way growing up because during the making and the writing of this album, I had previously lost people in my life that I loved very much. And it was sort of my first, like, deep dive into grief, which I had really been sheltered from. And then after that, I had my, I was pregnant and then had my child, my son. And so all of that was this strange, I don't know, this strange experience of a new type of, living in a new type of reality where I felt like I wasn't the child anymore. I was now the parent, and I wasn't maybe carefree in the world. I was experiencing what so many others have been experiencing for a long time. I just sort of stepped into it, and it was this kind of bittersweet welcome into, this new type of reality. 

CR: Take a look at this. We're gonna show a clip from the music video for "The Trapper and the Furrier".

[MUSIC - "The Trapper and the Furrier"]

CR: How how would you describe your sound? I mean, you've described it as using orchestral orchestral colors. 

RS: Mhmm. I think it's hard for me to think of myself and a sound.

CR: Yes.

RS: Because I am generating music a lot of the time and and it comes from just being in the world and oftentimes walking, especially in New York. When I walk to a place, I will write. And and then once that once I have to come into and actually really write, not just in my imagination, then I have to go from these abstract imaginary sounds into real life. So I could hear a sound in my head and then but when I touch the piano, it instantly it's like being woken from a dream and you kind of remember the abstracted sounds of your imagination, but this is a real life physical thing. It has hammers. It has strings. It was built. And so you're translating yourself. You're kinda translating your soul through these physical objects like violins and voice and piano. So I just kind of explore as much as I can because trying to reach those imaginary colors and not just completely ignore them, but be in the real world is a struggle. 

CR: When, how are you evolving as a musician?

RS: Honestly...

CR: I mean, you're no longer an emerging artist, are you? 

RS: I feel like I am. You know, I don't know. I think that my interest lies so much in the discovery of music and just the the the pleasure of of making art is so great and the moments when I get to do it, I feel so privileged to do it, that that's what I think about. So it's hard to know where I am in the trajectory of how I'm perceived or what I should be doing. I just sort of think, oh, this is this song. What does it need? Okay, that's done. Now, this is this song. Oh, it needs something completely opposite. Okay, I can do that. Yeah. You know? 

CR: How much of your work is autobiographical?

RS: Also very hard to know because so much of the fun for me comes from the imagination and trying to get out of my own perspective and experience other perspectives. I think that when I think of my tribe, I think of fiction writers and poets and and also playwrights. I really love...

CR: Like? 

RS: Oh, just, I mean, a billion, like Salinger and Chekhov and Pushkin. I mean, not that I would but...

CR: Philip Roth or...?

RS: Philip Roth too. I feel like he's much more, well, maybe I'll get there. He's darker than I am. [laughs]

CR: Yes. 

RS: I feel like with everything that's happening in the world, I might get there, you know. 

CR: But it's more classical novelists like, it's much by rights like Chekhov.

RS: And yeah. And also, you know, Bulgakov and Gogol and Kafka. I feel, very much at home in the surreal. That's where I feel at home. When I'm in the real world, sometimes I have to almost pretend because it seems so surreal to me. 

CR: Yeah. But there are those who say that your music is autobiographical and that this album is more autobiographical than previous.

RS: Well, that's the thing. I think that in our world, in the arts, we have created this false divide between confessional artists and fiction artists. And then there's this narrative that the confessional people really care and they're putting their real soul into it and it's soulful and honest and that fiction writers are just making stuff up and they're sort of arm's length. But to me, a Dylan song is not any less about, you know, even though it's surreal and it has images from biblical and historic and and all these other things that he's pulling from, it's not any less of his soul than Joni Mitchell, who is writing from her life story. And I feel like my soul and my personal experience is in everything, but if I engage my imagination, then I can look at something through multiple perspectives. As a man, as somebody who believes the opposite at than I do in the world, there's we have to push ourselves to look at things from other sides. Otherwise, we get really stuck, and also, we get these superiority complexes.

[MUSIC - "Small Bill$"]

CR: Yeah. This is this is the first album in 4 years.

RS: Yes. 

CR: Is that because you were having a baby and all of that? 

RS: Some of it is that. I mean, that's a lot. 

CR: He was born in 2014.

RS: Yeah. But, you know, I think some of it is just that it takes it takes time to make, to make art the way that you really hear it. I mean, there are songs on here that have, you know, maybe more than 200, 300 tracks in one song where we have sounds and layers and where we went down one path and then scrapped it and went down another path. So it just takes time. 

CR: How then do you create your art? How then do you write a song? 

RS: Well, I feel like if I knew exactly the answer to it, I would have a lot more songs, first of all. But second of all, I think that it's it's a combination of letting certain stories and certain emotions there's like an intake process and then an output process. And then when things kind of live through your system and you meet certain inspiring individuals, you read certain inspiring things, you see enough stories unfold before your eyes, then you are compelled to, in that moment, to write a song. But I don't really know, I do feel like it's inspiration, and then sometimes it happens in some way.

CR: But when you write songs, do you think of, do you think of melody, do you think of the music? Or is it simply words that you will find the music for later? 

RS: No. I usually write at the same time. So I will go usually to the piano and I will sing the words and and play the piano and it kind of comes out the same time and then I sort of play it over and over, maybe sometimes like 500 times in a row until it all just settles in itself.

CR: Did you once write "all the lies on your resume have become truth by now"? What did that line mean? 

RS: Again, it's really it's really hard to to say because the thing is, so I just I just came off of a tour. Right? And I was just playing these songs. I just played in the UK and in Europe. And and I I was playing these songs, a lot of them that are new to me from this new record, and on different nights, different lines would hit me a certain way of my own lines that I wrote, and I would think, oh, that means this. I mean, it was I had this really incredible experience of because I had a before and an after, you know, we found out about the election results in the UK. And certain songs that I had played in one way, the lines meant something else to me after. And I feel like they are my friends and I lean on them and I don't fully know what they mean, but the comfort that I have of playing them year after year is that they they mean more than I know. So I don't want to limit them with my understanding of them at this moment, because in 5 years, it could mean something else to me or something can happen, and and that line will take on a totally different meaning. 

CR: Is this both pop and classical? 

RS: Yes. And I love I love both very much. And classical is my home, you know? It's before my consciousness even, like, it was just there. It was it was always there kind of like air. 

CR: Thank you for coming. 

RS: Thank you, Charlie. 

CR: It's great to have you.

RS: Thank you so much. 

CR: The album is called Remember Us to Life. Thank you for joining us. See you next time.

[MUSIC - "Grand Hotel"]