Feature :: Regina Spektor in studio!!!

Regina Spektor - Laughing With

There was a crowd growing on Tremont Street outside the floor to ceiling windows of the WERS’ studio. Last Monday, those eager faces were watching the piano pop serenades of Soviet born Regina Spektor. She was in promoting her Boston concerts and new record, Far.



Before Spektor arrived at WERS, the studio techs had to quickly disassemble the two expensive studio microphones meant for her vocals, so she could set up her own, simple SM58. It was all her gracefully powerful voice needed.

The first thing Spektor played was ‘Laughing With.’ It’s a somber song that rounds up tragedies ranging from personal heartache to cataclysmic current events. Much like the balance of her sound between sweet sorrow and quirky humor, the song finds sarcastic humor in misfortune. This primarily comes from her suspicion for the likes of televangelists. “I noticed I end up writing a lot of songs that sort of think about religion and spirituality and how sometimes they go together and sometimes they don’t,” she said. Along with twinkling keys and booming chords, she sang, “God can be funny, at a cocktail party while listening to a good God themed joke.” Spektor’s preternatural aura and the sweetness in her voice as her falsetto trippingly spilt into quick rhythms made listeners believe that she actually did sip martinis with God on the weekends.



Spektor herself seemed eager to be back in a college setting. While promoting her last album, Begin to Hope, Spektor said that she kept accidentally calling her record producer a ‘professor,’ because she missed college so much. It’s been almost a decade since she graduated from the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in New York. “I realized that I think of it like a class,” Spektor said. “So I thought, for this next record I should have a few professors.”

On Far, she worked with four different producers. “When you do one record with one person you have this whole big arc of the experience. It’s very intimate. When you have a few people for a few songs, it’s a shorter experience, but it’s like intense little bursts,” Spektor said. “It took the pressure off. Everybody was experimenting and nobody was worrying about, ‘well, what’s the single going to be?’” The result is cohesive; a mixture of socially conscious ballads and playful tunes that showcase Spektor’s unique and fearless style.



Her last tune was ‘Folding Chairs.’ It’s a lively love song with wisdom like “the sea is just a wetter version of the sky.” It also revealed that Spektor can speak fluent dolphin, as her ‘Oohs’ transformed into the guttural cries of a marine mammal. She only had time for two songs, but what she chose were themselves like intense little bursts.

Spektor also tipped off listeners that she has begun to pen and compose a Broadway musical that should be out in 2011 or 2012. “I love theatre and I love old musicals like Sound of Music, Mary Poppins,” Spektor said. “Things like Singing in the Rain. I love the feeling of people just kind of bursting into song and music being really integrated into dialogue.”

At the end of the session, Spektor addressed the “nice people outside.” She said that their presence was a blessing, followed with, “Go to class now!” Despite the suits that were constantly pushing back the fans, Spektor graciously stopped to meet everyone on her way out of the studio.

www.reginaspektor.com

~Lee Stepien




Photography by Luana Suciu & Howard D. Simpson



Published to WERS.org on September 24th, 2009

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Feature :: Fecal Matter - Illiteracy Will Prevail

Kurt Cobain hits record on a four track machine in 1985. He didn't know that this tape would lead him to Krist Novoselic, future bassist and best friend. He didn't know that it would be replicated and faked after he committed suicide. He didn't know that this recording would become the most sought after, illusory and legendary piece of his music career. He was just screaming into a microphone.
Rumored to not even exist anymore, this little cassette was the holy grail for Nirvana fans.It's existence was officially confirmed when the Fecal Matter demo "Spank Thru" appeared on Sliver: The Best of the Box, a compilation of Nirvana's With the Lights Out. As far as I know, its never been released or fully revealed on the internet.

Fecal Matter began when Kurt Cobain had just started playing music and was a tag-a-long with The Melvins. The band primarily consisted of Kurt and The Melvins' drummer, Dale Crover. At least that's the personel on the recording. The band dissolved in 1986 when Dale and Buzz Osbourne were whisked away with The Melvins debut EP. Kurt passed around the little cassette to anyone that would listen and it eventually came into the hands of the gargantuan Croatian Krist Novoselic. They were married and had a child named Nirvana and, well, everyone knows the rest.

There's still some dispute over the validity of these recordings. However, the version of Spank Thru is the same that appears on Sliver and has the same fidelity, vocals and production as the rest of the songs. Since that version has been verified, the rest of the songs are most likely authentic as well. We'll never really know until there's an official release.

The recordings have a surprising fidelity for a 1985 demo. The tape begins with Kurt breathing and shivering into the microphone with an eerie, horror movie guitar wail. The album starts off dark and creepy then transitions into sarcastic and silly. Like Bleach that followed it, the songs are full of an untamed, nonsense energy and one can almost picture Kurt goofing off behind a mircophone in a basement.

Kurt Cobain was always a proponent of women's rights and civil liberties for the gay community, even from his first demo. "Laminated Effect" features Kurt's sensitivities to equality as a song where the characters are "Johnny was a homo" and "Lucy was a lesbian." It's a standout track on the record as Kurt's punk rock influences are present in the guitar riff's sludgy thrash and three chord repetition.

Of all the demos "Spank Thru" best stood the test of time. It showed up constantly during live shows until about 1991 and appeared on From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. This version is sung as the sarcastically sappy love jamboree should be, practically spoken with much sardonic disdain. "Class of '86" is a similar indictment, but of the high school types that he became famous for rebelling against. The mocking dialogue is quite amusing and covers a night of drinking until they puke, hand jobs and, "Me and my break-dancing friends went out and beat up some punk rock faggots." The chorus has Kurt shouting, "Clones!"

There are a bunch of untitled bits and pieces of recordings from Kurt and Dale's sessions floating around the internet as well as one or two other very strange songs. You can tell that some were made through a speaker, because you can hear people coughing and moving in chairs. Whoever has a copy of the tape probably had friends over and said, "Hey you want to hear this ultra rare Nirvana tape!" to which one of his friends replied, "Sure! Just let go to the bathroom first...so I can turn on my tape recorder..." Those songs didn't make it up here. The playlist I've compiled here is an attempt to recreate as closely as possible the tape Kurt passed around.

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