Regina Spektor “Samson”

I didn’t trust Regina Spektor at first. The first I’d heard of her was singing on a Strokes single, and while I actually like the Strokes’ music, I don’t trust them. Does that make any sense? And then everything I heard about her was comparisons to Tori Amos. We can all agree, right, love ‘er or hate ‘er, that we don’t need a copy of the woman? Right?

Once I opened my sometimes-jaded ears this year to her smart and bouncy ace pop tunes “On The Radio” (swear I got this one from Stereogum, but can’t find the post) and “Fidelity” (from My Old Kentucky Blog), I was pretty much converted.

So this was going to be a really emo post where I admit to first being disappointed by Begin to Hope because it was ballad-heavy, then being hit out of nowhere by “Samson” and finding myself driving and crying.

In the song–yes, a piano ballad–a woman casts herself and her lover as an alternate universe Samson and Delilah, she the devoted lover and he sometimes distant.

The first thing that struck me about “Samson” was the Wonder Bread/bed rhyme, which made me think of nothing so much as a songwriter lazy, or desperate, to make a rhyme. It’s funny how a song can take you entirely out of its context one moment, and then totally fucking slay you the next.

Somewhere between the sadness in “the history books forgot about us/the Bible didn’t mention us” and the falsetto, yearning “I loved you first,” she got me. I hope she gets you too.

Regina Spektor played the Palace Avalon Hollywood on Nov. 2.
Begin to Hope at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)