Regina Spektor has a new album out today. She’s excited, even if the passage of time itself remains a personal existential crisis.
“I’ve been worried about time since I was a kid,” she admits. “Like, even when I was little, I was afraid I was going to forget something really important. I felt like this old person looking back on my life, which is a strange headspace to have when you’re five.”
This explains a lot.
Spektor’s songwriting has always had an otherworldly relationship with time—sometimes playing with it, sometimes lamenting its existence, and occasionally treating it like a slightly menacing force. “Enjoy your youth, sounds like a threat,” she sings on the new album. A lyric so cutting that critics are already circling it like a rare animal sighting.
She gets it. Growing up is weird. “You hit your teenage years, your twenties, and suddenly, you don’t care about time at all. You think you’re invincible, you think you’re smarter than everybody. Then you get a little older and you’re like, ‘Oh. No one actually knows what they’re doing. No one’s driving this ship.’”
Welcome to the great midlife realization: the people in charge aren’t wizards, they’re just taller versions of the same kids who thought Mountain Dew was hydrating in high school.
Spektor has been thinking about this even more lately, thanks to parenthood. “Having a kid shakes everything up,” she says. “You suddenly see time in this totally different way. I felt the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt, because here’s this person you love so much, and you can’t just say, ‘Everything will be okay forever.’”
This shows up all over the new album. Songs like “The Trapper and the Furrier” and “What’s the Rest of Our Year?” deal with time in a way that feels both personal and cosmic. “My son has allowed me to time travel,” Spektor says. “Seeing the world through his eyes—it’s like he’s rewiring my brain.”
Parenthood also means her son thinks the entire world is a musical, because of course he does. “He probably assumes that every person bursts into song and dance every five minutes for no reason,” she laughs. “Which, honestly, wouldn’t be the worst way to live.”
Spektor has been reading up on time perception, particularly the idea that the key to stretching out your life isn’t actually living longer—it’s experiencing more awe. “Apparently, if you go through a routine day, it feels like a certain length. But if you do something extraordinary—like hike to the top of a mountain—your day actually feels longer. The idea is, the more awe you experience, the longer your life feels by the time it’s over.”
She sighs. “Of course, I still have a hard time with the whole ‘living in the present’ thing. I’m constantly time-traveling in my head, thinking about the past or worrying about the future.”
Maybe that’s why she writes songs that feel like little pocket dimensions—worlds you step into for three or four minutes, only to come out on the other side wondering how you got there. “The songs I love the most, they suspend time for me,” she says. “I want my songs to be little trips that people can take.”
In that way, she sees music like books or radio, forms of media that let the imagination wander rather than dictate every sensory experience. “I like when your mind’s eye can still be seeing something while your ears are listening,” she says.
It’s why she still loves radio. And books. And music. And, presumably, why she hasn’t spent 600 years of her hypothetical 700-year lifespan watching Netflix.
But if she had the time, she might.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
