Music – ‘Real Love’ Regina Spektor (2007)

Regina Spektor (born 18 February 1980) is a Russian-born American singer, songwriter and pianist.

Spektor’s father was a photographer and amateur violinist, and her mother was a music professor.

Wikipedia says:

[Spektor’s] family left the Soviet Union for the Bronx [in New York] in 1989, when Spektor was nine and a half, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. She had to leave her piano behind.^[16] The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the Soviet Union, but they finally decided to emigrate due to the racial, ethnic, and political discrimination that Jewish people faced.

In New York City, Spektor studied classical piano with Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music, until she was 17; Spektor’s father had met Vargas through Vargas’ husband, violinist Samuel Marder.

Spektor completed the four-year studio composition program of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College within three years, graduating with honors in 2001.

Spektor released her eighth studio album in 2022.  

The following is a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Real Love’ for Triple J’s ‘Like a Version’ performed in Australia in 2007, as introduced by Richard Kingsmill.