Thursday May 10  

   Three songs from Regina Spektor’s seventh CD, “What We Saw From the Cheap Seats,” are being streamed online ahead of its May 29 release. The singer-songwriter-pianist released a live album in 2010, but this is her first studio effort since “Far” three years ago. And she is starting to get feedback.
     “People will say this is my most poppy record,” said Spektor, on the phone from Orlando, “and people will say it’s my least poppy record. People will say I’ve changed and people will say I haven’t changed. For every single thing someone decides, someone else will decide the opposite.”
      It’s not a debate the 32-year-old Spektor cares to weigh in on.
     “One of the big lessons is you make the record you want to make and let go of it,” she said. “Start breathing and just hope it will reach the people, that it’s not going to get stopped at the gate too much. I just love songs. I love them because they help my heart. They make me happy. I think all I want to do [with my music] is go somewhere together with people. In that way, I feel lucky because when I look at my audience, it’s not like all hipster kids or rock ‘n’ roll kids. It’s really diverse and it’s beautiful to me.”
     Spektor plays the Orpeum Theatre Thursday May 10 with her trio and they will play nearly all of “Cheap Seats.” What she aims to provide for the audience is a sense of liftoff.
     “A lot of the times,” she said, “when you don’t have that liftoff in a concert – or a film or any work of art – and you just stay put, it’s almost like a sadder feeling than if you didn’t go at all. It looks like things are being done and it sounds like things are being done and you think, ‘Something must be wrong with me because I don’t feel anything.’”
     Spektor specializes in imaginative, sometimes cryptic story-songs. She doesn’t favor linearity. Her tunes, even the short ones, have multiple parts and the result can be a tossed salad of whimsy and poignancy.
     “It’s a constant shifting of perspective in my head,” Spektor said, adding her technique is something she shares with the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut. “You know he’ll have these little asides where he’ll talk about a certain world he just made up? I think that’s how my brain works a lot of times. It’s almost a science fiction thing or like turning a kaleidoscope.”
    A brilliant example is the sweeping new song “All the Rowboats.” It concerns great art works which are confined to museums – or “public mausoleums” housing “masterpieces serving maximum sentences.” Spektor sings, “They’ll keep hanging in their gold frames, for forever, forever and a day/All the rowboats in the oil paintings, they just want to row away, row away.” It may sound precious on paper (or on-line as the case may be here), but it’s a deeply moving and strangely sad song. Link to video here: http://youtu.be/2CZ8ossU4pc
     Spektor was reticent to speak about how that song, or any, took shape. She likes the mystery. “Talking about lyrics is the hardest thing for me,” she said. “It doesn’t really add anything. I feel like the songs are so complete and so alive, and I love that you have your own moment with them.”
     A classically trained pianist, Spektor came rather late to pop, and discovered artists she now loves and is frequently compared to – Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Kate Bush, Elton John – well after she began her musical journey. She considers various parts of her identity – Jewish, Moscow-born, New York-raised, bi-lingual, female – as part of “a very big stamp. All these stamps are on top of each other. And in the end, there’s this glob of colors that you can’t differentiate. And that’s like me. I feel really glad to be all these things. Each one is a cultural thread you can tug on.”
Tickets: $52-$41.50. Only Son opens at 7:30.

(This is an expanded version of a story that ran in the Boston Herald, www.bostonherald.com Wednesday.)

One Hamilton Place, 800-745-3000.  www.orpheumtheatre.com