Regina Spektor Song Quotations

The only thing they really get to pick is the single. But I get to pick the producer, the songs on the record, the final masters, the artwork. Basically, I hand them a record.

It's always interesting to me to see people projecting things, like people would say, "This record is much more mature than your other record" and I would think, "Well, this record has more songs from when I was 18 on it than the other one."

I don't think about, "How does this song that has more of an electronic mix prefix to a song that has a full orchestra next to a song that has other things?" I just work on it as-needed.

You ask a person what their personal favorite song on the album is, and it's literally the one with the least amount of listens if you looked at the statistics of it.

I have my own tastes and I have my my own... like, I dunno. I think it's really subjective; something that I think is a great song, is unlistenable to somebody else, which I've come to realise.

I started to write before I went to SUNY Purchase music conservatory. As an audition I submitted what I now think are really awful songs, but I guess they saw something in them.

Yeah. My singing and my songs were very influenced by all of that. People would come up to me and ask, Is that a Billie Holiday song? I'd say, No, it's my song. The lyrics would be in my style, but the songs would be very jazzy.

I hate picking favourite books. I usually tend to stay away from all the 'top record' and 'favourite song' and 'favourite book', and I just think it doesn't do any good for anybody.

When I think of my art tribe - you know, my peeps - there are certain people who are autobiographers that I really love. But for the most part, overwhelmingly, my tribes are the surrealists and the storytellers, in song and literature.

If somebody wanted to go and find songs of mine to fill an iPod, that aren't on any records. They could probably find dozens of songs besides the ones that are on records.

I also don't like to make really big records, because I feel then that the songs don't get enough space to be themselves, so I would never want to make a record that's like seventeen songs.

You are always growing, so maybe the way that you bring the songs forward and translate them is more mature.

I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes it's own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember.

This is the way I want to die. Torn apart by angry fans who want me to play a different song.

It doesn’t feel natural for me to write some diary type song. I want to write a classic like Yesterday but weird songs about meatballs in refrigerators come into my head – I can’t help it.

I knew all this Beatles music. I knew the songs phonetically. It was like my whole experience of that music was out of focus, and somebody put the perfect glasses on me, and all of a sudden I could see everything.

Songs kind of live in a timeless place for me, and since I make records I dunno, about every two-and-a-half to three years or something like that, it's just not enough to put all the songs that I have, no matter how much I put.

Luckily, there's enough people who have recorded songs that I can just go online and kind of figure out how to play them.

I'm really terrible at math, so I won't even attempt to do ratios and percentages, but all I know is that there's a lot of new songs that no-one has heard yet, and that there's a lot of old songs that some very, very super hardcore fans have heard for sure - there are people that have been coming and seeing me play in bars in like 2002, and there are songs that those people heard.

I feel like there's just so much of everything that I don't know what people have heard and what they haven't heard. I think with the fact that there's the Internet and that people can share home-made recordings, I think a lot of the songs do get to be heard, even if it's not the best quality, or there's clinking glasses or it's just piano and voice, people can at least hear the song.

I think to me, all songs are stories.

It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.

I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write. My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room.

Most of the time I don't even talk about any direct lineage of songs, because I feel like it just chains them down into my own consciousness, and the whole fun of them is being able to live in others' consciousness.