The Singles Jukebox

How many of you have ever felt personally nostalgized by Regina Spektor?

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Hannah Jocelyn: “Bleeding Heart” is neither as lyrically complex as an early song like “Summer In The City,” nor as musically intense as What We Saw From The Cheap Seats‘s epic leadoff “All The Rowboats,” but that’s far from necessary at this point in Regina Spektor’s 15-year career. Even when she switches up the drumbeat like Cheap Seats‘ opener “Small Town Moon,” everything feels looser and freer, somewhat like the goofy charm of her early albums. “Bleeding Heart” might mine familiar territory, but Regina’s performance and Leo Abrahams’s inventive production ensure that it sounds far from autopilot. And the ending — just Regina, her piano, some strings, and some buried vocal samples — is plain beautiful.
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Katherine St Asaph: Regina Spektor was among the last of an entire genre of piano-pop that’s been unjustly written out of music history. Even the title seems of a bygone era — we have other pejoratives for sensitive liberals these days. Unsurprisingly, I always preferred the Spektor of “The Flowers” or “Après Moi,” the torrential pianist, to the Spektor of “Fidelity,” the jaunty yearbook scribe. “Bleeding Heart,” with its pitter-patter rhythm, music-box melody and Game Boy plinks, is closer to the latter but charming nevertheless. And the last third is a register shift that justifies your patience.
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Alfred Soto: It has the command of space electronic dynamics of Owen Pallet and the insouciance of Fiona Apple, and whether it’s the repetition of the hook or the cello undergirding it “Bleeding Heart” courts archness and thank fucking god. Best line: “You won the war so it’s not your turn.”
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Cassy Gress: The chord progression ii-I is not exactly compelling, particularly when repeated this many times without a V to break it up. By the time she gets to the bridge, which is essentially the chorus but “harder”, she may as well be Dana Carvey choppin’ broccoli. The song closes with the part of the CSI episode that’s about 2/3 of the way through, where Sara gives Grissom some bad news in his office late at night, and he stares at his desk, having deep inner thoughts that will not be spoken of until four seasons later.
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Scott Mildenhall: The mantra-like chorus is perfectly suited to a biography, because at different times it can mean different things, while remaining a haunting constant. It’s alternately a gentle push, sarcastic jibe, ghostly leitmotif, and end-of-tether vexation at a friend’s struggles, unfulfilment and possibly self-destruction. Are they the remembered words of a friend long lost, or are they what that friend is still thinking? One bleeding heart is bad; a pair is a hopeful tragedy.
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Juana Giaimo: I don’t know when Regina Spektor’s music stopped meaning anything to me. Five years ago, I would have talked about “Bleeding Heart”‘s ability to reach listeners through warm melodies and genuine words. But now I only listen to a pleasing melody and a voice with charisma that’s commonplace once again.
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Will Adams: In the mid-aughts, my main mode of consuming music was watching videos on VH1 after school. iTunes was still too new, too vast, and I had begun to tire of the Top 40 stations cycling through their limited playlists. Looking back from a present where new music blasts at you from all directions demanding to be heard, it’s fascinating how these channels curated their own offerings. This was a place for more subdued genres to find an audience — namely, adult contemporary-friendly light rock, the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Switchfoot, and Regina Spektor’s “Fidelity.” What drew me to Spektor’s music was that amid the light, polished production of an album like Begin to Hope were songs that, at their core, had simple, piano-and-voice constructions with impactful emotion. With subsequent albums, Spektor augmented the arrangements, while I turned my attention to the influx of blogs at the end of the decade. I wondered if my love of her music would remain a relic of my past. “Bleeding Heart” picks up exactly where I left off, with the same emotion, but with those electronic flourishes — big drums, synth bubbles — rounding out the sound. The final minute completes the circle, rising out of the clamor like dust from a demolished building. The central line “never mind your bleeding heart” ceases to be the frantic self-directive of before. It is now reassuring, peaceful, and it restores that initial love I found sitting on the living room floor alone, listening.
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