Description
On the release of her eighth album, the Russian-born singer-songwriter talks about making music amid children and Covid –and why stories are the best vehicle for emotional truth.
“I have the kind of mind, I’m realising, where I almost get hypnotised by the world,” she says. “There’s a part of me that’s the immigrant chick: let’s get things done. And then there’s some other part of me that just floats off.”
That spirit is in her music, too. Spektor gravitates towards the big stuff – life, death, love, time – that most songwriters tend to approach at a slant, like looking at the sun.
New York based Spektor fled the city during the pandemic and recorded Home, before and after, her eighth studio album and her first since 2016, in a converted church upstate. It’s possibly her best album and certainly her biggest, with a glorious orchestral sound that’s commensurate with her themes. So it’s surprising to learn that she recorded it on her own but for producer John Congleton and engineer Ariel Shafir; the orchestra was actually in Macedonia.
