Regina
Regina Spektor rocks my saucy little world.
We first saw her when she came to Vancouver in early 2007. On the stage at the Commodore she was wonderfully awkward and alone. She filled the room with her voice, with only her chair (brought from NY), guitar, and a piano (unfortunately not her own) to accompany her.
Today she took the more grown up stage at the Orpheum, in front of rows upon rows of screaming but generally polite fans. Rather than the sparse stage of the first show we’d seen, this one was filled with cables and speakers and instruments and other people. Her new stuff is powerful with the addition of drums and strings and extras, but I was pleased when everyone else left and we could listen to Regina alone. She is marvellous!
Reilly has graduated from bad crowd photos with snuck in cameras to being a portable recording machine, so he may have music to share at some point. The acoustics in the Orpheum weren’t quite perfect so the recording has a more bootleg feel than the Ani show we saw last week, the recording of which sounds like it was properly mixed in studio. Even though we own most of the released recordings of both artists, there’s something about having a cut of a show that you were actually witness to.
The power in either of these voices can’t be captured on tape, but each recording combined with my memory is good enough for me.