Regina Spektor - Songs [Blue & White]

Regina Spektor recorded Songs at the piano in a single day, and every take still feels like it is happening in the room. This indie-exclusive pressing comes on blue and white vinyl.

Her second album, released in 2002, was cut in its entirety on Christmas Day 2001, each song captured in one take. Self-released and sold at her early live shows, it spent years as a cherished rarity among fans who had caught her in small rooms. It captures the moment just before the wider world found her, raw and already unmistakably her.

The arrangements are just voice and piano, which leaves her phrasing nowhere to hide and no reason to. "Samson", later re-recorded for Begin To Hope, appears here in its earliest and barest form, while "Prisoners" and "Oedipus" show off her knack for stories that swerve from comic to devastating within a verse. She closes with a stark reading of Jacques Brel's "Ne Me Quitte Pas", sung with a quiet intensity that hushes everything around it.

There are no studio tricks softening anything, only a remarkable young writer at the keys, playing as if nobody had told her what the rules were.

For anyone who fell for Spektor through her later records, this is the origin story, and it holds up beautifully.