Regina Spektor

Regina Spektor is a Russian-born, New York-raised singer-songwriter and pianist who emerged from Manhattan's anti-folk scene in the early 2000s. Born in Moscow to a musical family, she moved with her parents to the Bronx as a child and grew up straddling Russian, Jewish and American influences, all of which later shaped her idiosyncratic songwriting. Trained classically on piano, she brings a distinctly percussive, melodic sensibility to her arrangements, often layering playful vocal quirks — clicks, whispers, sudden register shifts — over piano-driven pop.

After several self-released records, she signed to Sire Records and broke through with Begin to Hope, which produced the singles «Fidelity» and «Better» and pushed her into the mainstream. Follow-up albums Far and What We Saw from the Cheap Seats both debuted high on the Billboard charts, cementing her as one of the era's most distinctive singer-songwriters. She is widely known for «You’ve Got Time», the Grammy-nominated theme song for Netflix's Orange Is the New Black.

Spektor's songs tend to read as small, vivid short stories, populated by odd characters and told with a storyteller's eye for detail. Her willingness to bend melody, language and structure — sometimes within a single song — sets her apart from more conventional singer-songwriters and has earned her a devoted following well beyond the anti-folk scene she started in.