Regina Spektor
Bayou Music Center
August 9, 2025
Regina Spektor greeted her audience at Bayou Music Center with a wardrobe observation.
“As I was walking out, I realized that I’m basically dressed as Dorothy,” she said, referencing the gingham dress famously adorned by The Wizard of Oz’s protagonist, Dorothy Gale. Slight difference, Spektor’s checkered pattern was red and white, but we could see it.
“So, now I have to do it,” she continued. “Doing it,” was opening a two-hour, career-spanning set with “Over the Rainbow” to set the mood and allow for a theme she could occasionally recall over two dozen songs. Singing acapella to the only song on the set list not penned by Regina Spektor, she was inviting us to lock arm in arm with her and skip down a path paved with gold, all the songs we came to hear, the ones with lyrics and notions which have helped us defy gravity and soar since we first heard her more than 20 years ago.
In Spektor’s version of this tale, she’s Dorothy, the mixed-up Midwestern kid. During the set, she even bemoaned the fact that her shoes were white and not ruby red. But if she was any Wizard of Oz character last night, she was clearly the tornado, the force of nature who powered through with piano crashers like “Apres Moi” and “All the Rowboats.” She was the whirling dervish who swept us away with motion and emotion on offerings like “Us,” and “Baby Jesus,” a surprise in the set and a gust of fresh air that’s still cycloning about our brains today.
Most of all, she blew into Houston, the last stop of her successful Midsummer Daydream Tour, to drop a house on the wicked witches that bedevil us. Her voice, so recognizable – soft as a whisper at times between songs and rumbling with F5 tenacity while singing – delivered the lines that crushed the bad feelings that circled overhead like so many flying monkeys. Spektor’s vocals command attention which is key since they deliver some of our favorite lyrics of the 21st century.
It was Spektor’s first Houston show since a Warehouse Live Eado appearance in 2007
Photo by Jesse Sendejas Jr.
A lot of those lines feel empowering and instructional (a very specific example coming later), but they’re also wry, funny, heartbreaking, tender and true. The first Regina song of the set was “Folding Chair,” a jaunty tune from 2009’s Far, the follow-up to Begin to Hope, the breakthrough album. There’s a line in “Folding Chair” that says so much about the perspective she brings to listeners.
“I’ve got a perfect body,” the line starts, “but sometimes I forget. I’ve got a perfect body ’cause my eyelashes catch my sweat, yes, they do, they do.”
So true and so forgotten even though it’s right there in front of and literally on our faces! Spektor’s gift is her ability to remind us of these small but notable blessings, how grateful we should all be that we’re not blinded by the sting of our own perspiration and can sometimes see the beauty and joy in life. It’s not always an easy thing to focus on, given the present state of things. Spektor is Jewish, a New Yorker who emigrated to the U.S. from Russia as a kid. At least once during the tour, her show was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protestors. Reportedly, Spektor answered by saying “I’m a real person who came here to play music.”
There’s a time and place for those conversations. These matters are important and can’t go without resolution. And, Spektor’s evocative words do make us reflect on our humanity. They encourage us to affect change and even Begin to Hope. It’s not a defense for injecting politics into an evening of entertainment, but her music moves people.
In Houston, there were no interjections of this sort, but the night wasn’t without its own intrusions. Introducing “Raindrops,” she said the song was “a specific to Houston request.” That set off a torrent of audience callouts, shouts for favorites like “Consequence of Sound” or “Genius Next Door” or “On the Radio,” which were all left off the set list (more on that last one in a bit). To tame the eager, expressive crowd, Spektor said, “Oh God, oh God! This is my nightmare, I’ve had nightmares like this, exactly like this. You’re all kind of in a dim light and I start to panic. I’ve never done it as Dorothy, but I’ve definitely had this dream before.” That prompted one loud spectator to add, “Just play what you want!” which helped restore some order.
Spektor’s set list changes nightly, but her Houston run was filled with reminders of what matters. Sometimes those reminders are straight-forward and no air siren can save you from their devastation. For example, “Firewood,” from What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, which plainly states “nothing can stop you from dancing,” if you want and that since we all know we’re going to live, well, “you might as well start trying.” The song ends with Spektor’s Beatles-esque reminder “Love what you have and you’ll have more love,” which she delivered perfectly last night.
“Reading Time with Pickle,” from her 2002 collection titled Songs (“By the way, if you ever have to name a record, don’t name it Songs. It’s very confusing,” she noted) wasn’t the last song in the set. “Samson,” was the show’s encore tune, the one which sent Spektor breezing away from Houston, though hopefully for not as long a time as passed since her last show here in 2007. “Pickle” imagines the goodness of a life-changing pickle. You have to take a journey through the supermarket, the house and matters of the heart to get to it, but the ending of the song is pure Regina Spektor, a vortex of resonant sound and thrilling, scary, human emotion.
“Man, pickle jars are just pickle jars, and pickles are just pickles. Ingredients, water, salt, cucumbers, garlic, and pickling spices. But love is the answer to a question that I have forgotten, and I know I’ve been asked and the answer’s got to be love.”
Personal Bias: “No, this is how it works/You peer inside yourself/You take the things you like/Then try to love the things you took/And then you take that love you made/And stick it into some/Someone else’s heart/Pumping someone else’s blood.”
Those lyrics, from Spektor’s song “On the Radio,” (absent from last night’s set list), are some of my favorite lyrics ever written for any song. Top 5, no doubt, were Rob Gordon to ask me. Reading them feels instructional, like they should be numbered, with finely-drawn, Ikea-styled diagrams for assembling the most perplexing but essential construction, the human heart. We don’t fall in love, we create love, we piece it together, bit by bit, Dr. Frankenstein like, with an Ikea leaflet that sometimes makes no sense, no matter which way you turn it. Consider every meaningful relationship in your life and tell me Spektor wasn’t impossibly wise beyond her years when she wrote those lines for her breakthrough album, Begin to Hope.
It doesn’t just apply to love for someone else, but something else, too, specifically art. My kid Marissa is a musician and their (their preferred pronoun) interest in music was spurred by the love my wife and I had for music, something we stuck in their heart. They looked up to their older sibling, also a musician, who stuck love for music into their heart, too. But the most influential person outside of the family to Marissa’s interest in and pursuit of music was Regina Spektor and there isn’t a close second.
When Marissa’s sibling, Jesse, learned guitar, Marissa asked for a piano. We told Marissa we’d buy them an expensive Christmas gift if they were serious about learning the instrument. And they responded by practicing daily, usually to songs from Soviet Kitsch and Begin to Hope. Before long, they were writing songs, catchy melodies with thoughtful lyrics and emphatic vocals, unabashedly Regina-like. We’d drag that piano to Super Happy Fun Land and The Mink and to Houston’s punk houses for them to perform in a fashion that would have made their mentor proud.
These days, Marissa sings and plays drums for a band and that band is headed to Australia to perform later this year. We won’t be dragging their drums or piano around, but we’ll be going as roadies and proud parents to see the latest events in a music career that began in earnest with teenaged Marissa listening to (and mimicking) songs like “Somedays,” “Ghost of Corporate Future” and “Consequence of Sounds.”
Spektor was perpetual motion and emotion as she blew through Houston.
Photo by Jesse Sendejas Jr.
Marissa’s partner, Evalyn, surprised them with tickets to Regina’s show in Denver earlier this week and Marissa heard those songs live again for the first time in almost two decades and cried a little. We know why — we did, too. You take the love you make and stick it into hearts – your spouse or partner, your children, the family you grew up with, the friends you cherish and, if you’re like Regina and Marissa, the people who listen to your music and share it with the ones they love. That is how it works.
Random Notebook Dump: This space is usually reserved for shouts out and this time around it’s many, many thanks to Tory and Pete, who we dined with before we all went and walked into a whirlwind. They’re always great company, compelling conversationalists and fellow foodies who know the good spots. (Culinary note: Houston Restaurant Weeks is in full swing and The Lymbar is definitely worth a visit. They’ve opened up practically their entire dinner menu to the promotion, which raises funds for Houston Food Bank. Excellent cocktails and we highly recommend the pollo bahia, the empanada trio and the tres leches). On top of all that, they’re huge music fans so it was a nice date night for us all. It’s been stated before here in the Dump, if you can catch a show with friends (our next one with besties? Molotov at 713 Music Hall in September), do it!
Regina Spektor Set List
Over the Rainbow (Harold Arlen cover)
Folding Chair
Eet
Becoming All Alone
Raindrops
Reading Time with Pickle
Loveology
Baby Jesus
What Might Have Been
Don’t Leave Me (No Me Quitte Pas)
Better
Grand Hotel
Human of the Year
Apres Moi
Firewood
Poor Little Rich Boy
That Time
Reginasaurus
Two Birds
All the Rowboats
Us
Fidelity
Samson