"So they all kept coming up to me and saying I sounded like somebody else: Joni Mitchell, Björk, Cat Power, Janis Joplin, Billie Holliday, Nina Simone, Tori Amos... This got me confused: they're all so different. What this meant was I couldn't be classified, I knew I was on the right track."
 Thus a queen of different musical genres born the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, Regina Spektor (home), told 'Les Inrocks' (20-26 April 05, pic: Renaud Monfourny) what she made of attempts to do what you won't really find here often when I'm talking about singer-songwriters.
This "sounds like" business I've complained about before is almost everywhere in music reviews by "professional" -- that is, paid -- and self-appointed critics alike and is so annoying! enjoyed a chance to hear, but sadly not borrow, 'Songs' in 2002 (CD Baby), a dozen pieces of piano and poetry which earned Spektor the "anti-folk" etiquette, but 'Les Inrocks' caught up with the child prodigy ballet girl to talk mostly about 'Soviet Kitsch', which has to wait for next month's VoW budget.
Generously, the iTMS in France also has her début album '11:11' (2001) on offer, dubbing it "traditional music". Some of it is anything but traditional. Spektor, scarcely the demure damsel of this photo, reckons, to her long-lasting sadness, that she was "no longer a Russian" from the day Moscow customs officers took away her souvenir ruble coins when her family quit the country for the Bronx when she was nine and already feeling she had an "old soul", given over to "waking dreams."
You'll be reading more, if you like, in coming weeks. For one of Amazon UK's helpful listmaniacs, "fevertosell," 'Soviet Kitsch' makes Regina part of the 'Art Rock Underground'. Art rock? Not all of it, but I like a compiler who can dare suggest these days, of somebody else -- Whirlwind Heat -- they "prove that the White Stripes are merely a fashion fad, and this is the real thing."
Try saying that about the White Stripes in Paris today and many people would thump you.
I'm finding it hard to keep up even weekly with 'Les Inrocks', let alone the monthly science and Mac mags I subscribe and now mainly skim for stand-out articles of real interest to me because most days when I'm on the move and pull one out of a bagful, the women's words in my head tear my attention back off the pages.
Remember the Patti Smith of the 70s, back in the time of 'Horses', still one of my favourites?
 "Well, she's certainly still got it, has Patti Smith," I could tell anyone who cared to listen this morning. Her picture is a detail from one by Robert Mapplethorpe (Foundation), who had quite an eye for nudes of both sexes, charmingly described as "mature content". Patti wears her hair longer and greyer nearly 30 years later, but proves something I'm fond of telling the ladies: it's absurd to start worrying about the numbers on their birthdays when the finest ones I know get nothing but better, and very often a lot sexier, with age.
It's a mess, is 'Gung Ho,' first released almost five years back, but a right royal mess. It even has a 'GUNG HO 2000' site of its own (and next month, I'll be in a mess myself about 'Tramping', her latest, torn between a studio or live choice, probably opting for both.)
There's no "sounds like" problem with poet Smith, scarcely always the "high priestess of punk". 'Libbie's Song' is about as straight as country music comes, 'China Bird' is an exquisite, almost hymnal piece of writing, singing and melody which almost demands you hit the repeat button, but this magnificent album includes two strong, long angry ballads, 'Gung Ho' itself and 'Strange Messengers'. Of the latter anti-slavery song (any reminder of 'Strange Fruit' quite deliberate), I should let Steven Solder say it as he does at Amazon UK; after some rough times, it "illustrates Smith's renewed interest in the world around her, as the streetwise New Yorker turned Midwestern suburbanite rails at crackheads ('That's how you repay your ancestors?')."
Patti Smith (home) is wise to illustrate her place with Blake. certainly does. Solder's also politer about what I call a mess, saying 'Gung Ho' is "somewhat muddled in execution, but then again, so are the times." It's an album to remind those of us who get accused of having "heads in the clouds" the utopian dreams we can find there were always worth having and still are.
Here's one: I'd love to hear -- the nearest I'll go to a "sounds like" is 'Glitter in their Eyes' -- is what Patti and her crew could cut if they got an act together with Johnny Clegg (home but in London next month) and his Zulus. After writing about a batch of VoWs mainly into the intimate and close at hand -- relationships and all that -- it's a pleasure to talk of dreamers like Patti Smith and Regina Spektor, each out in their different ways, to change the world.
zzz
Hanging out with a few friends
That reminds me, while I listen to another great American voice of the decades, Carly Simon, to broadcast how I've recently told a friend or two that my own' LP' is "dead"; the screenplay, I mean, to which you've had ample reference (also in the "glossary").
Last weekend, I trashed much of it since, first, it dawned on me that the Quiet Revolution I enjoy seeing around us and going on about is more fun simply living than trying to chronicle over the decades. Secondly, an increasingly widely shared acknowledgement that political revolutions very rarely work -- because they usually lead to bloodbaths, new forms of dictatorship and ideologies as bad as those they sought to replace -- is manifest in so many aspects of 21st century life that trying to do a film about the quiet one is more of a challenge than I can take on if I'm to sleep and hold down a job with any competence at the same time.
The characters, given a free rein to weave their life stories together and apart and together again, had begun to run away with my mind! However, given "Oh no, you can't just drop it" responses (like the time I thought I'd done enough logging here), perhaps it's best to say that the 'LP' is indefinitely "on hold", which might cheer up others involved in the project (I've not ditched the whole lot).
Recent experiences and insights, partly from friends in the blogosphere I currently fail to link to as frequently as I might (since nowadays I tend to catch up with your lives in quieter moments at work, but please don't tell the bosses that's another good reason for Firefox), often from friends nearer to hand -- have inclined me to see the merits of action, best free of reasons.
"We have no secrets"
(as Carly S says in one standard)
"We tell each other everything
About the lovers in the past
And why they didn't last
We share a cast of characters from A to Z
We know each others fantasies
And though we know each other better when we explore
Sometimes I wish
Often I wish
That I never knew some of those secrets of yours."
Who doesn't feel that way sometimes?
There's another way to look at it though. The Quiet Revolution will never make converts, that's part of how it works, like most sweeping social changes that are for real but slow, rather than enforced. But some of those who turn out to feel a part of it, like many of my close friends, also turn out to be good at knowing "some of those secrets of yours", sometimes in the oddest of ways. Occasionally I've mentioned my own.
When used to this, you wind up finding there's nothing very much wrong with telling each other everything and a little more self-disclosure, rather than trying to hide stuff, almost invariably does far more good than harm. With most of my friends
"Sometimes I find
Often I find
That I'm glad I know more of those secrets of yours".
That's my "F*f" of the week (whoops, I thought "fuckinfilosofy" was in the glossary already; it is now along with a couple more terms): of the people I love, those most prone to misery are sometimes the ones who prefer to keep stuff to themselves, often without realising the "secrets" they're most ashamed of or -- worse -- feel guilty about are no less and certainly no more than the common lot of humanity and always were.
"F*f" usually goes in the orchard. Not this time. There's a great deal to be said for an outlook I recently learned the way you do things when they have to sink in: it's a fearful waste of time to be motivated by any compulsion to explain.
1:09:22 AM link 
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