Regina Spektor Will Go Far

She likely broke your heart with "Fidelity," admit it. That vocalization on heart ("ha-ha-ha") seems skittering but try it at home. It's the singer's equivalent of an entrechat six. Regina Spektor seems nonchalant about it, the reinvention of laughter inside a heart.

Her new album Far opens with "Calculation," and here she lyrically, surgically, removes your heart and slaps it against a granite countertop. "Hey this fire, it's burnin', burnin' us up," she announces pleasantly. The album contains 13 songs that will tantalize a certain kind of music critic or fan with "meanings." If you like, you can start decoding the lyrics and the mystery, taking Spektor's temperature.

Strictly speaking, she has already come far. Born in Moscow in 1980, she left in 1989 when Perestroika brought on the peregrination of restless Soviets. Her parents were escaping anti-Semitism, so their next stop, Austria, can't have seemed in retrospect a well-researched choice. Italy didn't take either. Finally they settled in the Bronx.

You can read her lyrics as a kind of poetry which is not true of most--if poetry today can be too dependent on sight-reading, pop song lyrics lie there on the page, evoking nothing but banality until the singer interprets them. "Human of the Year" has a stanza that goes:

The icons are whispering to you,

they're just old men,

like on the benches in the park,

except their balding spots are glistening with gold.

First, that's a nice image. Secondly, just as poetry's description asks you a question about what you think you've seen, these lines ask a question about what holiness is. Maybe it is the ability to see the gold in bald spots.

On the album, God, religion, and god's-eye-views keep cropping up in the midst of daily life (indicated by a Blockbuster, meat market, and bookstore). There's a touch of Suzanne Vega in some of these New York apartment scenes--but you brush up against innumerable influences. The album's producer credits include Jeff Lynne, David Kahne (a return after Begin to Hope), Mike Elizondo, and Garret Lee.

In this case, the center holds--Spektor already has such a distinct sound, the dance of vocables among the percussive piano notes, that she never sounds like anyone else.

• Regina Spektor plays at the Paramount on Tuesday, November 3, at 8 p.m. Brooklyn's part-'70s, part-indie rockers Jupiter One open. Tickets are $27.50-$35 (plus TicketMaster fees).