Nobel Prize precedent aside, this is not a particularly great time to be a pop singer-songwriter. Royalty pay is underneath the toilet for most songwriters for hire, and solo songwriters aren’t faring much better. What used to be, for better or worse, its own genre—a solo acoustic, piano or guitar, maybe some strings—is practically nonexistent in today’s market. The pop chart has drowned it out for years. The alternative music charts are capricious, but lean rock and male. The adult contemporary chart is basically just the pop chart, minus rap.
It’s not that these artists have stopped making music. That music’s just been decontextualized and diluted-down and flung in a dozen directions. You can succeed with traditional singer-songwriter fare if you're male—see Ed Sheeran, or Jake Bugg, or whoever else is being heralded as the savior of musical authenticity this year—but if not, your niche is dead of a thousand market fluctuations and Lilith Fair insults, and your options are limited. The closest things in the past few years to traditional singer-songwriter hits are Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” which sounds basically like Katy Perry, or Ruth B’s “Lost Boy,” which is literally four-and-a-half minutes of Vines.
Such a market doesn’t allow singer-songwriters much of a legacy. The 2000s had no shortage of talent, much of it sharp enough to resist dumbing-down and some of it rewarded commercially, but it hasn’t produced a mainstream household name, a Fiona Apple or a Tori Amos. In an alternate universe one of them might have been Regina Spektor, whose 15-year career deserves much more recognition than it's gotten. The problem is, there are two Regina Spektors: the public perception and the actual musician. The actual musician records character studies, often set to dizzying classical-piano gusts like “The Flowers” and “Aprés Moi,” and writes with an earnestness not often seen these days. You can draw a direct line from Spektor’s albums to artists working today like Sara Bareilles or Ingrid Michaelson.
The public perception takes that earnestness and recasts it as one-dimensional quirk—it’s probably not coincidental that this style of music peaked around the same time the “manic pixie dream girl” archetype did—in order to dismiss it. This has actually been an incredibly good few years for Spektor; her theme song to “Orange Is the New Black” was nominated for a Grammy in 2013, and she’s recorded with artists like zeitgeist-y Chance the Rapper. But it’s been a low-key kind of success, one that hasn’t resulted in any inescapable singles like “Fidelity” or “Samson.” And yet, Spektor has continued to release, every couple of years, some pretty decent albums.
Remember Us to Life is another pretty decent album, but a more somber affair. Spektor recorded it with a full orchestra—“I almost felt like the subconscious of the record was strings,” she told Rolling Stone—and it lends the album a certain weightiness. There are undertones of preoccupation with one’s legacy throughout. It often rises from subtext to actual text, as on the resigned “Obsolete” (“This is how I feel right now: obsolete manuscript no one reads and no one needs”) or “Tornadoland,” which sets Spektor’s plainspoken line against a blossoming orchestral swell that at one point resolves itself into something resembling the THX intro. Against this, Spektor’s piano line becomes an almost cartoonish downward dive, matching the lyrics: “Everybody’s time has come, it’s everybody’s moment except yours.” The mood is one of panic, restrained until the moment it no longer can be; see also single “Bleeding Heart,” about pain tamped down, featuring a bridge that shouts and claps and exults until it too is snuffed out.
The biggest buy-in with Spektor’s music has been that earnestness, its requiring you to be OK with songs that talk about rowboats feeling trapped in paintings, or laughing at God as one of us, or ditching your corporate job to take off your shoes and splash around in puddles. Remember Us to Life doesn't dispense with these nostrums, but it does rewrite them in a minor key. “The Trapper and the Furrier" is much like “Ghost of Corporate Future,” but the shoe-splashing of the former is replaced by a funeral dirge in which the rich only get more, more. If that sounds dreary, “Small Bill$” is what passes for upbeat: the same message (pretty much Discworld’s Sam Vimes theory, rewritten to include weed and Coca-Cola and an implied 99% uprising), just in the form of funhouse cabaret with bitterly lilting backup vocals. (If that sounds equally intolerable, Spektor’s probably never going to be for you.)
Remember Us to Life suffers from inconsistency; against the weightier atmosphere, less adorned, more traditionally Spektor songs like “Older and Taller” or “The Light” sound like they come from an entirely different album. But Spektor’s albums have always been tonally inconsistent—Begin to Hope had classical pieces “Aprés Moi” next to ballads next to electronic moves like “Edit” next to fizzy and (yes) quirky singles like “Fidelity” and “On the Radio,” and it all was perfectly fine. In Spektor’s catalogue, Remember Us to Life balances comfort food for Spektor fans with the maturity and wisdom you'd expect from a singer-songwriter passing the 15th year of her career.
CORRECTION: The original version of this piece used an incorrect title and insinuated that Spektor received a Grammy nomination in 2016.
