At the 9:30 Club for the Regina Spektor show, and a list of t-shirts I've seen so far...Sufjan Stevens, Modest Mouse, a show featuring Pearl Jam with Death Cab for Cutie opening. Ms. Spektor was surprisingly punctual, polite and petite, but lovely in the Russian Semitic way of which I'm so fond.
I was quite simply amazed by how good she was. She started off her set playing solo, with her band joining her about a third of the way through. Her voice is both more subtle and more powerful than how it comes across on her albums, and she has a wonderfully playful, girlish stage presence. Melding her anti-folk cred with a hip-hop sensibility and her classically trained Russian sensibilities, she's a one-woman tour de force. The high point of the night was her (seemingly unreleased) song Bobbing for Apples, featuring the lyric, "Someone next doors fucking to one of my songs". Her most powerful piece was Apres Moi, featuring a snippet of a Boris Pasternak poem. Listening to this tiny, curly-haired woman singing in Russian, I thought to myself that I would never want to piss her off.
I was quite simply amazed by how good she was. She started off her set playing solo, with her band joining her about a third of the way through. Her voice is both more subtle and more powerful than how it comes across on her albums, and she has a wonderfully playful, girlish stage presence. Melding her anti-folk cred with a hip-hop sensibility and her classically trained Russian sensibilities, she's a one-woman tour de force. The high point of the night was her (seemingly unreleased) song Bobbing for Apples, featuring the lyric, "Someone next doors fucking to one of my songs". Her most powerful piece was Apres Moi, featuring a snippet of a Boris Pasternak poem. Listening to this tiny, curly-haired woman singing in Russian, I thought to myself that I would never want to piss her off.