Concert Reviews

Review & setlist: Regina Spektor’s kookiness contains multitudes at MGM

The kookiness spiking throughout her songs not only failed to break the spell of her performance, it enhanced it.

By Marc Hirsh

August 1, 2024

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Regina Spektor at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, Wednesday, July 31

Nearly every Regina Spektor song has something silly packed inside. Maybe it’s the way she describes eating nothing but tangerines for a month in “That Time” by brightly squeaking “So cheap and juicy!” It could be her retching towards the end of “Music Box,” and then retching once more for good measure. Perhaps it’s the dolphin noises in “Folding Chair” (or the fact that said dolphin noises are simply Spektor going “ooh ooh ooh”). The singer is nothing if not playful, both as a performer and a songwriter.

So it feels strange to argue that the overriding emotion behind Spektor’s material is a weighty sadness. How can a song that begins “Summer in the city means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage” curlicue into a deep loneliness without suffering a distracting tonal break? Only Spektor knows; that’s her uncommon gift as an artist. At the MGM Music Hall at Fenway on Wednesday, she threaded that needle time and again over the course of an hour and a half with nary a hiccup.

In fact, the kookiness spiking throughout her songs not only failed to break the spell of her performance, it enhanced it. “If I kiss you where it’s sore, will you feel better?,” she sang in “Better,” adding “Will you feel anything at all?,” and the tongue clicks she threw into the middle of the word “anything” offered joy and deep melancholy and a hand reaching out to provide connection.

Like a low-fi Laurie Anderson, her mouth was full of mechanical whirs as the up and down notes of her piano gave “Chemo Limo” a sense of soft alarm. All of it gave weight to the seriousness at the heart of her music, or at least argued that kookiness can itself contain seriousness and depth when strategically deployed, lest the heaviness of how life feels all the time break her down.

Alone on stage with a Steinway grand piano (moving to electric keyboard and electric guitar for one song each), Spektor had the flexibility to wander down unlit corridors without a band there to either slow her down or force her songs into more conventional shapes.

She started “On The Radio” by clapping a beat for the audience to follow, only to immediately slow it down once they had. “Raindrops” might have been fairly standard singer-songwriter fare but for a constant push-pull with the tempo that made it take place very nearly in free time. The mangled tango of “Baby Jesus” shifted musically and vocally so often – Spektor’s voice switching from high and chirpy to low and chewy in very short order – that it played like an exercise in keeping up with her.

And those few songs that played it entirely straight hit even harder. Built on Carole King gospel chording, “Firewood” was simultaneously delicate but forceful, heartwrenching and gorgeous, and she sang the traditional Jewish prayer “Avinu Malkeinu” straightforwardly.

The extraordinary “Après Moi” was an ominous whirlwind surrounding a single high piano note hammered incessantly as red light slowly rose behind her and she let out guttural explosions and slipped into Russian. And her piano on “All The Rowboats” was a gentle klaxon, not hard but insistent.

Spektor got lost trying to remember the lyrics following the interlude of that one, so she simply talked her way through a rough précis of what they were supposed to be rather than struggle for the words, stop the song or vamp aimlessly. That suggests that the funny little quirks that populate her music aren’t deliberate insertions but reflect the way she genuinely interacts with the world.

It came through in closing song “Samson,” the singer sympathetically giving herself over and recasting vulnerability as a defense mechanism and a weapon for building happiness wherever possible. Or, as she put it in “Raindrops” several songs earlier, “In a town that’s cold and gray/We will have a sunny day.”

Setlist for Regina Spektor at MGM Music Hall at Fenway — July 31, 2024

• Folding Chair
• The Flowers
• Becoming All Alone
• Eet
• Baby Jesus
• Firewood
• Blue Lips
• Summer In The City
• All The Rowboats
• Better
• Poor Little Rich Boy
• That Time
• Après Moi
• Human Of The Year
• Music Box
• On The Radio
• Two Birds
• Avinu Malkeinu (traditional)
• Raindrops
• Chemo Limo
• Us
• Fidelity

ENCORE:

• Samson

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.