Regina Spektor Talks Two Strings, Three Pillars and Why All You Need Is Love.
Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty
Paste recently sat down with Regina Spektor to chat about her interpretation of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” for the soundtrack of Laika’s feature Kubo and the Two Strings, and what the Beatles mean to her music.
Paste: You’ve recorded covers before, like “My Man,” which was made famous by Fanny Brice, and you’ve previously covered John Lennon, so I have to ask: is it intimidating to cover other artists? Especially artists that are heroes of yours?
Spektor: The word intimidating is not necessarily the word that I would choose, but I find covers really hard. I find that it’s much easier to write my own song than to figure out my way into somebody else’s song. But the exciting thing is when you do end up finding your way into a song that you already love, you get this new understanding of it. So that’s always special, and I felt that way about covering “Real Love” by John Lennon, or other covers, [like when I] I covered “No Surprises” for Doctors Without Borders. I love that song, and it’s almost like you pull the song closer and get to know it in this whole other way.
I think there are a lot of musicians out there that just pick up a guitar or sit at the piano and they can play anything. I am from the other group of musicians, who have to figure it out. I have to find my way with it, and it’s kind of clunky until I get there, but then I have this exhilarating moment of, “I got it! Now I’m inside.”
Of course with this George Harrison song, it’s special to me on so many levels. When I saw the film, the song that was temped in was the Beatles’ version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and I was like “why the fuck do they not want to use this—it’s perfect!” It was incredibly cathartic, you know, guitars pounding and stabbing and George’s voice and all those harmonies, and I was like, “why do they want me to sing it?”
After I talked to Travis [Knight, the director], and he explained to me where the song is coming from, how it’s a mother’s song to her child, and how it starts out as almost a lullaby and then gets stronger and stronger, and then gets picked up by the children at the end, then I was like, “wow, this is such a beautiful way to look at it and to imagine it,” and because it was completely different instruments than how I’d ever heard it, and in the vocabulary of the film, it wasn’t intimidating at all. It probably should have been, but it was just exciting.
I felt very free, and both Travis and Dario [Marianelli] kept sending me these little notes that were like,“Just feel free to experiment. Be yourself!” and they were so sweet. [It’s great] when people give you that freedom to just do something, come up with your own way into it. Or like Jenji [Kohan] did with Orange is the New Black. She told me, “I’m gonna make this show. These are a few stories from it”—and then she just said, you know, find your way into it. All of a sudden you really feel this excitement as opposed to pressure, because you’re not trying to fit yourself into some mold; you’re just like “I’m really just going to try and be as true to what this feels like to me.”
Paste: Twice you’ve re-recorded your own songs, and there’s a quote I loved where you said you wanted to “obliterate and replace” the original version of “Samson” because it bugged you so much.
Spektor: (laughs)
Paste: When you talk about covers, is that something you ever think about? How do you make a song your own, or do you even want to make it your own? Do you ever want to replace the original version?
Spektor: Never, never. No, that kind of perfectionist masochism is reserved only for myself. I’ve never thought of it like that with other people. The only thing that comes to mind is: is there a reason to cover it? Because I’ve heard covers of songs that I love where the person covering it strips away all the things that are awesome about the original. They take the melody that is your favorite, and they just throw it into the trash.
I think that the thing with covering a song, to me, is you’re walking the fine line of there has to be a reason why you’re doing it. There has to be something of you that’s in it, but it’s not just “me, me, me,” and not just about the song, and not about the original person who created it or whose version you really love, but somewhere in there, in that murky little in-between world, that’s my aim every time.
Even when you mentioned the Boardwalk Empire song, “My Man”—I didn’t get to know it as that version, as Fanny Brice. I got to know it as the Billie Holiday version. But when I was doing it, I was like “no, this takes place in that time period, and with all original instruments that are idiomatic to that time period,” and the attempt was to try and be in the world of Fanny.
Paste: The Beatles are clearly one of your biggest influences, and the U.S. has always had an interesting, insane relationship with the Beatles, but that wasn’t the case throughout the world. Stop me if this is a familiar story, but my best friend growing up was a pianist who immigrated from Russia and lived in Forest Hills, and when she came to the U.S. she was shocked to learn that Queen and Roxette were not the biggest, most popular bands in the United States, but that’s just what she had access to when she was growing up—
Spektor: That was how I grew up! [Queen] and Moody Blues and the Beatles were what I had!