Listen to Regina Spektor on Batanga

Regina Spektor was born in Moscow, Russia, to a musical Jewish family. She learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination which Jews faced.

Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, the family settled in the Bronx, New York, where Spektor graduated from the SAR Academy, a middle Jewish day school. She then attended high school for two years on a scholarship at the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, but, feeling out of place, eventually transferred to a secular public school, Fair Lawn High School, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where she finished the last two years of her high school education.

In New York, Spektor studied classical piano with Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music. Although the family had been unable to bring their piano from Russia, Spektor found a piano on which to play in the basement of her synagogue, and also practiced on tabletops and other hard surfaces.

Spektor was originally interested only in classical music, but later became interested in hip hop, rock and punk as well. Although she had always made up songs around the house, Spektor first became interested in more formal songwriting during a visit to Israel with the Nesiya Institute in her teenage years when she attracted attention from the other children on the trip for the songs she made up while hiking and realized she had an aptitude for songwriting. Following this trip, she was exposed to the work of Joni Mitchell Ani DiFranco, and other singer-songwriters, which encouraged her belief that she could create her own songs. She wrote her first a cappella songs around age sixteen and her first songs for voice and piano when she was nearly eighteen.

Regina completed the four-year studio composition program of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College within three years, graduating with honors in 2001. She gradually achieved recognition through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City.

Spektor's songs are not usually autobiographical, but rather are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination. Her songs show influences from folk, punk, rock, Jewish, Russian, hip hop, jazz, and classical music. Spektor's musical style has drawn many comparisons to fellow singer-pianists Tori Amosand Fiona Apple as well as the vocal stylings of Björk. Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole.

Since 2005, Spektor's music has been used in various television programs and commercials. She was recently named #3 on VH1's Top Artists Charts. Her song "The Call" appeared on The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and it was used in the film as part of the finale sequence.