Happy 15th: Regina Spektor, SOVIET KITSCH

15 years ago this month, Regina Spektor released her first major-label album.

Granted, it was actually her third album, and it had already been released independently 15 months earlier, but that’s hardly the point, now, is it? What’s important is that this time it was on a major label!

Co-produced by Gordon Raphael, Alan Bezozi, and Spektor herself, SOVIET KITSCH had a title which advertised that it wasn’t necessarily going to be light listening, since Spektor borrowed it from Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who used the phrase as a disparaging description of the aesthetics of Stalinist-style communism. Then again, if you weren’t all that well-versed in Kundera’s work, you might’ve just thought, “Oh, this is kitschy! That’ll be fun!”

Well, “fun” is kind of a relative term, but at the very least, SOVIET KITSCH was critically acclaimed – indeed, it was so beloved that New Musical Express named it one of the 100 greatest albums of the 2000s – and fans of artists like Fiona Apple and Cat Power certainly ate it up without hesitation.

That said, it took mainstream audiences a little bit longer to find their way to Spektor’s music, but while SOVIET KITSCH failed to chart, Spektor’s follow-up album, BEGIN TO HOPE, climbed all the way to #20 on the Billboard 200.