Latest news with #Spektor
Yahoo
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Regina Spektor tells pro-Palestine protesters at concert: ‘You're just yelling at a Jew'
Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor's concert in Portland, Oregon, was interrupted by pro-Palestine protesters at the weekend, prompting her to tell them they were 'just yelling at a Jew'. Spektor, who is Jewish and emigrated with her family to New York from the Soviet Union as a child, was filmed by a fan as she addressed an audience member who started shouting 'free f***ing Palestine' during her performance at Revolution Hall on Saturday (26 July). After the first audience member interrupted the show, another fan apparently began repeating: 'Free, free Palestine'. Other pro-Israel fans shouted 'am Israel Chai' – Hebrew for 'the people of Israel live' – according to The Hollywood Reporter. Spektor, 45, has voiced her support of Israel in the past, including two days after the 7 October 2023 attack at Nova Music Festival. She wrote, in part: 'If you've devalued Jewish life so much that mourning murdered Jewish children at a festival, raped women, and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust has offended you – leave.' Stereogum reported that one protester had charged the stage while shouting 'free Palestine', prompting Spektor to say: 'I don't know what he thinks he's doing. I really appreciate the security.' Spektor encouraged the pro-Palestine protesters to leave the show, remarking: 'This is not an internet comment section… I'm a real person who came here to play music.' 'If anybody wants to walk out, this is your chance. Does anybody else want to take a walk? You can.' In the fan video, some more attendees can be seen leaving the concert. Spektor told her audience: 'The only reason I even speak English is because I came here to escape this s***. I only speak English because I came from a country where people treated Jews as othered, and I'm being othered here and it sucks. 'It'd be nice if one of my family's generation didn't have to go to a new country and learn a new language and just stay put. Have nice lives, you guys.' The Independent has contacted Spektor's representative for comment. The incident at her concert comes amid growing tensions in the music industry surrounding artists' stances on the Israel-Gaza conflict. In October last year, Radiohead's Thom Yorke walked offstage after being confronted by a pro-Palestine protester, whom he branded a 'coward'. Last month, punk group Bob Vylan sparked controversy as they led Glastonbury crowds in chants of 'death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]', a moment that was broadcast live by the BBC. The duo denied allegations of antisemitism, stating that their words were aimed at the Israeli government, not Jewish people. 'We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs, or any other race or group of people,' Bob Vylan said in a statement to Instagram. 'We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine.' Earlier this month, on 24 July, Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap were banned from Hungary for three years, forcing the band to cancel their scheduled performance at the country's Sziget Festival. Government spokesman Zoltán Kovács wrote on social media platform X that the decision to ban Kneecap was due to 'antisemitic hate speech and open praise for Hamas and Hezbollah'. In a statement on their social media channels, Kneecap blamed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for the ban, calling his government 'authoritarian' and criticising him for welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hungary in April this year, despite a warrant for his arrest from the International Criminal Court over accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. 'We stand against all hate crimes and Kneecap champions love and solidarity as well as calling out injustices where we see it,' the band said. This week, humanitarian organisations said that starvation and malnutrition have reached a critical point in Gaza as Israel continues to block essential humanitarian aid from entering the area.
Fox News
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Regina Spektor show interrupted by anti-Israel protesters screaming, ‘Free f------ Palestine!'
Singer Regina Spektor had to pause her concert on Saturday thanks to raucous anti-Israel protesters in the crowd. During Spektor's performance in Portland, Oregon, multiple people in the audience began yelling "Free Palestine," prompting the musician to pause her set and get security to escort them out. "You're just yelling at a Jew," she told the hecklers before they were directed to leave the premises. Video footage captured by a fan, and reshared on TikTok by music outlet Stereogum, showed the moment one member of the audience began yelling, "Free f------ Palestine!" at the singer inside Portland's Revolution Hall. The protesters' outburst was met by cries from fed-up concertgoers, one of whom chanted, "Am Yisrael Chai" – or "The people of Israel live" – in response. The footage showed Spektor, a Jewish woman who immigrated to New York from the Soviet Union when she was a child, appearing to communicate with someone offstage to get security involved. "I don't know what he thinks he's doing," the singer told the crowd, referencing the outburst. Some in the crowd responded by applauding Spektor, and apologizing for the interruption. "I really appreciate the security," she added in a soft tone, prompting laughter from the crowd. Some yelled, "We love you!" Still, the outbursts weren't over. Another individual started screaming, "Free, free Palestine! Say it! Say it!" Again, someone responded, "Am Yisrael Chai!" By the time the lights turned on in the venue, revealing the crowd, Spektor quipped, "I thought this was different than the internet. This is real life." The crowd applauded again. Still another protester spoke up, saying, "There's a genocide happening." Spektor addressed the heckler, saying, "You can leave the show if you want. This is not an internet comment section. I know that you are mistaking my show for a YouTube video––" "I'm not," the heckler replied. "You are," Spektor shot back. "I'm watching children dying. That hurts," the anti-Israel agitator added. "Yeah, I think you should go because this is not the place for that conversation," the singer said. Elsewhere, Spektor told the crowd, "The only reason I even speak English is because I came here to escape this s---. I only speak English because I came from a country where people treated Jews as othered, and I'm being othered here, and it sucks." Spektor has publicly spoken out about the Israel-Hamas conflict in the past. Just days after the October 7 Hamas massacre, she mourned for Israelis and Palestinians alike in an Instagram post. "My tears are endless but my heart has enough room… Room for murdered, raped, and kidnapped innocent Jews. Room for bombed innocent Palestinians suffering and dying in Gaza. Fury at Hamas whose mission is exterminating Jews while hiding behind Palestinian human shields." As the post went on, Spektor criticized Israel's government, but defended the nation and its people. "Israeli government is NOT its people, like any other government on earth. Netanyahu does NOT speak for all Israelis, or all Jews living across the world. In the Middle East – Israel is the ONLY democracy with a chance to vote/protest/change its government. The ONLY land where LGBTQ people are able to live safely. The ONLY land which doesn't mandate women's dress or behavior." Reps for Spektor and Revolution Hall did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Should babies get a 'bonus dose' of the measles vaccine? Doctors say it depends
Like many anxious parents, Beth Spektor spent the last few weeks fretting over how to protect her infant daughter from the first deadly measles outbreak to hit the U.S. in a decade. Her 9-month-old was too young for the first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, typically given to American toddlers shortly after their first birthday. But when her New Jersey mommy WhatsApp group started buzzing about an early bonus dose of MMR for babies, Spektor decided to ask her pediatrician for one anyway. "I was assuming she would say, 'It's up to you,' or 'It's not a bad idea,' something a little less definitive," the mother said. Instead, the doctor urged her to take the extra jab, a move they recommended to all infant patients after three linked cases were reported in their region. "[The doctor] said she was hoping that [U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] would change the schedule to recommend that all babies over 6 months get the bonus dose," Spektor said. Read more: A blind boy went viral after the L.A. fires. But what happens when the internet moves on? That's unlikely, experts say. Despite the current outbreak, measles is still rare in the U.S., and while MMR is safe for babies as young as 6 months, it's more effective in toddlers. Most pediatricians still recommend holding off until a child's first birthday, with few narrow exceptions. Meanwhile, Kennedy has spent this week touting codliver oil and steriods, alongside a tepid endorsement of vaccines. Yet even as record numbers of parents now delay or decline inoculation, pediatricians and public health experts said they've seen a surge in requests for bonus doses following the death of an unvaccinated six-year-old in West Texas last week. When reports of an infected Orange County infant carrying measles through Los Angeles International Airport began to circulate Friday, that curiosity turn to panic in some households. "There has been a noticeable increase in parental concern about measles, particularly among those who plan to travel with young children or who have infants in daycare," said Dr. Priya R. Soni of Cedars Sinai Medical Center, an assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases. "Some parents are requesting early MMR vaccination, which is an appropriate strategy in certain high-risk situations." So-called "zero" or "supplemental" doses of MMR have long been recommended to jet-setting infants who will travel to countries such as Ireland, Sri Lanka or the Philippines before their first birthday. While most people survive a measles infection, the disease kills more than 100,000 children every year worldwide, leaves an additional 60,000 children blind and thousands more with permanent brain damage. The grave risks are why early shots are also given to babies living near domestic outbreaks. The Texas Department of Public Health is currently recommending bonus doses for infants in six counties, including Gaines, where the largest outbreak emerged. "It's one of the most contagious illnesses that we know about," said Dr. Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., who helps explain infectious disease to her 2.3 million followers on TikTok. Martin got her own daughter a bonus dose before a visit to New York during a measles outbreak there in 2018. But she said most parents should forego it unless their babies are headed to a high-risk country or live in an outbreak region. Dr. Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Orange County and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics' California chapter, said he recommended bonus doses to his patients in 2014, during the height of the Disneyland outbreak. But with no active outbreak in the area, he is advising patients to wait. Read more: Beloved toys and stuffed animals are gone. How parents can help kids understand L.A. fires But some doctors said they were open to early vaccinations even for infants whose daycare classmates travel abroad, as well as families in communities where many parents avoid or space out vaccines. "I actually recently had a conversation with a parent [who said], 'We're moving our almost one-year-old to a place with a lot of vaccine hesitancy, so we'd like to do an early MMR,'" said Dr. Nelson Branco, an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at UCSF, who sees patients in Marin County. After searching the local kindergarten vaccination rate, "I said, 'It's not strictly recommended, but I would give it if you'd like.'" Doctors agree early jabs aren't as effective as later ones, which is why they don't count toward the two-dose series all children need for kindergarten. That hasn't deterred some pro-inoculation parents on TikTok and Reddit from trading tips on how to snag extra shots for trips to Disney World, even as anti-vax parents smear them as toxic and deadly on the same comment threads. "Looking through posts [on Reddit], I kept seeing it," said Angela Owens, a first-time mom in Maryland who underwent a stem cell transplant in 2022 and had not yet gotten a replacement MMR when she got pregnant. 'Continually seeing those posts, it's like, 'Am I worried enough? Am I worried too much?'' Doctors said their experience was the same in clinic. "I'll be in one room, and I'll talk to a patient for 30 minutes to convince him to get one vaccine, and I'll go to the next room and have someone who is eager to give their kids an extra bonus vaccine,' said Ball, the Orange County pediatrician. The practice of handing out bonus doses gave some experts pause. Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said it reminded him of the early days of the COVID vaccine, with part of country refusing vaccination and part of the country collecting so many shots they "should have had a Pfizer loyalty card.' "The benefits of waiting until 12 months of age is greater than the largely theoretical risk that you're going to be exposed to someone with measles," even in a daycare setting where a baby might be exposed to other children who are traveling internationally, he said. Babies get their earliest "vaccines" from their mothers, in the form of blood proteins that pass through the placenta in the third trimester. Those maternal antibodies protect infants while their immune system matures. But they can also blunt the affect of the measles vaccine, neutralizing the weakened virus before the baby's body mounts a response. "There's not a simple formula," said Dr. William Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins. "If you wait longer, a higher proportion of children will develop a protective response. We're weighing that with the child's risk of getting measles." In places where measles is common, the World Health Organization recommends the first vaccine at 9 months, when the vast majority of infants will develop immunity. Where it is rare, the recommendation is between 12 and 15 months when nearly all children will. "There were some very early studies ... that did suggest children who got an early first dose of the measles vaccine had less of a response to a later dose," Moss said. "My take on that literature is it was flawed and there were a number of subsequent studies that did not demonstrate that." Read more: 'League of Justice': California AG part of group gearing up for court battles with Trump But newer studies have complicated the picture in another way, he said. The current guidelines were developed at a time when many mothers had immunity from measles infections. Now, most have immunity from the vaccines themselves. Though babies still inherit these maternal measles antibodies, they're weaker and wane sooner than those from wild-type measles, studies show. The World Health Organization has supported earlier inoculations in some cases, noting in 2020 that babies in countries such as the U.S. "may become susceptible to measles well before the age of vaccination, but they may also be more likely to develop protective immune responses when vaccinated." Babies often get measles from school-age siblings, meaning as vaccine hesitancy spreads — including the practice of spacing or delaying vaccines — so does danger. "We're seeing a lot more kids in practice that are not being vaccinated," said Martin, the Florida doctor. "Maybe only 85% of [2-year-olds] I see in practice are vaccinated, which is concerning." She and other experts agreed, the best defense for babies is for everyone else to get their shots on time. "The bottom line message is people should be vaccinated," Moss said. "If enough of the general population is vaccinated, we will protect infants from getting measles through herd immunity. That's what's worked." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
06-03-2025
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Should babies get a ‘bonus dose' of the measles vaccine? Doctors say it depends
Like many anxious parents, Beth Spektor spent the last few weeks fretting over how to protect her infant daughter from the first deadly measles outbreak to hit the U.S. in a decade. Her 9-month-old was too young for the first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, typically given to American toddlers shortly after their first birthday. But when her New Jersey mommy WhatsApp group started buzzing about an early bonus dose of MMR for babies, Spektor decided to ask her pediatrician for one anyway. 'I was assuming she would say, 'It's up to you,' or 'It's not a bad idea,' something a little less definitive,' the mother said. Instead, the doctor urged her to take the extra jab, a move they recommended to all infant patients after three linked cases were reported in their region. '[The doctor] said she was hoping that [U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] would change the schedule to recommend that all babies over 6 months get the bonus dose,' Spektor said. That's unlikely, experts say. Despite the current outbreak, measles is still rare in the U.S., and while MMR is safe for babies as young as 6 months, it's more effective in toddlers. Most pediatricians still recommend holding off until a child's first birthday, with few narrow exceptions. Meanwhile, Kennedy has spent this week touting codliver oil and steriods, alongside a tepid endorsement of vaccines. Yet even as record numbers of parents now delay or decline inoculation, pediatricians and public health experts said they've seen a surge in requests for bonus doses following the death of an unvaccinated six-year-old in West Texas last week. When reports of an infected Orange County infant carrying measles through Los Angeles International Airport began to circulate Friday, that curiosity turn to panic in some households. 'There has been a noticeable increase in parental concern about measles, particularly among those who plan to travel with young children or who have infants in daycare,' said Dr. Priya R. Soni of Cedars Sinai Medical Center, an assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases. 'Some parents are requesting early MMR vaccination, which is an appropriate strategy in certain high-risk situations.' So-called 'zero' or 'supplemental' doses of MMR have long been recommended to jet-setting infants who will travel to countries such as Ireland, Sri Lanka or the Philippines before their first birthday. While most people survive a measles infection, the disease kills more than 100,000 children every year worldwide, leaves an additional 60,000 children blind and thousands more with permanent brain damage. The grave risks are why early shots are also given to babies living near domestic outbreaks. The Texas Department of Public Health is currently recommending bonus doses for infants in six counties, including Gaines, where the largest outbreak emerged. 'It's one of the most contagious illnesses that we know about,' said Dr. Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., who helps explain infectious disease to her 2.3 million followers on TikTok. Martin got her own daughter a bonus dose before a visit to New York during a measles outbreak there in 2018. But she said most parents should forego it unless their babies are headed to a high-risk country or live in an outbreak region. Dr. Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Orange County and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics' California chapter, said he recommended bonus doses to his patients in 2014, during the height of the Disneyland outbreak. But with no active outbreak in the area, he is advising patients to wait. But some doctors said they were open to early vaccinations even for infants whose daycare classmates travel abroad, as well as families in communities where many parents avoid or space out vaccines. 'I actually recently had a conversation with a parent [who said], 'We're moving our almost one-year-old to a place with a lot of vaccine hesitancy, so we'd like to do an early MMR,'' said Dr. Nelson Branco, an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at UCSF, who sees patients in Marin County. After searching the local kindergarten vaccination rate, 'I said, 'It's not strictly recommended, but I would give it if you'd like.'' Doctors agree early jabs aren't as effective as later ones, which is why they don't count toward the two-dose series all children need for kindergarten. That hasn't deterred some pro-inoculation parents on TikTok and Reddit from trading tips on how to snag extra shots for trips to Disney World, even as anti-vax parents smear them as toxic and deadly on the same comment threads. 'Looking through posts [on Reddit], I kept seeing it,' said Angela Owens, a first-time mom in Maryland who underwent a stem cell transplant in 2022 and had not yet gotten a replacement MMR when she got pregnant. 'Continually seeing those posts, it's like, 'Am I worried enough? Am I worried too much?'' Doctors said their experience was the same in clinic. 'I'll be in one room, and I'll talk to a patient for 30 minutes to convince him to get one vaccine, and I'll go to the next room and have someone who is eager to give their kids an extra bonus vaccine,' said Ball, the Orange County pediatrician. The practice of handing out bonus doses gave some experts pause. Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said it reminded him of the early days of the COVID vaccine, with part of country refusing vaccination and part of the country collecting so many shots they 'should have had a Pfizer loyalty card.' 'The benefits of waiting until 12 months of age is greater than the largely theoretical risk that you're going to be exposed to someone with measles,' even in a daycare setting where a baby might be exposed to other children who are traveling internationally, he said. Babies get their earliest 'vaccines' from their mothers, in the form of blood proteins that pass through the placenta in the third trimester. Those maternal antibodies protect infants while their immune system matures. But they can also blunt the affect of the measles vaccine, neutralizing the weakened virus before the baby's body mounts a response. 'There's not a simple formula,' said Dr. William Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins. 'If you wait longer, a higher proportion of children will develop a protective response. We're weighing that with the child's risk of getting measles.' In places where measles is common, the World Health Organization recommends the first vaccine at 9 months, when the vast majority of infants will develop immunity. Where it is rare, the recommendation is between 12 and 15 months when nearly all children will. 'There were some very early studies ... that did suggest children who got an early first dose of the measles vaccine had less of a response to a later dose,' Moss said. 'My take on that literature is it was flawed and there were a number of subsequent studies that did not demonstrate that.' But newer studies have complicated the picture in another way, he said. The current guidelines were developed at a time when many mothers had immunity from measles infections. Now, most have immunity from the vaccines themselves. Though babies still inherit these maternal measles antibodies, they're weaker and wane sooner than those from wild-type measles, studies show. The World Health Organization has supported earlier inoculations in some cases, noting in 2020 that babies in countries such as the U.S. 'may become susceptible to measles well before the age of vaccination, but they may also be more likely to develop protective immune responses when vaccinated.' Babies often get measles from school-age siblings, meaning as vaccine hesitancy spreads — including the practice of spacing or delaying vaccines — so does danger. 'We're seeing a lot more kids in practice that are not being vaccinated,' said Martin, the Florida doctor. 'Maybe only 85% of [2-year-olds] I see in practice are vaccinated, which is concerning.' She and other experts agreed, the best defense for babies is for everyone else to get their shots on time. 'The bottom line message is people should be vaccinated,' Moss said. 'If enough of the general population is vaccinated, we will protect infants from getting measles through herd immunity. That's what's worked.'
Chicago Tribune
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: A still indie Regina Spektor revisits her album ‘Songs' at Thalia Hall
Regina Spektor thinks about words differently than most of us. That much was clear Sunday at the first of a sold-out three-night stand at Thalia Hall, where the singer-songwriter literally and figuratively explored the consequence of sounds, syllables and silences at a bare-bones show bursting with accessible eclecticism and quirky perspective. Though flawed, the solo outing possessed the courage to fail and put a refreshing spin on the tired 'album-play' concept. Looking back at her younger self while combing through songs she made before she landed a record deal, Spektor offered fans a candid view into her origins for the first hour of the 105-minute concert. The decision proved rare and unguarded. Most contemporaries either reserve proto-fare for polished, late-career archival projects or leave it locked away in a vault. Shy only in the matter of blowing her nose due to a minor cold, the 45-year-old Russian native greeted the challenge with gregarious charm, honesty and huge smiles. She appeared shocked that the audience embraced material she described as 'super weird' and never thought would be heard in her adopted hometown of New York, let alone Chicago. Spektor asked for forgiveness in advance, knowing she'd probably lose the thread at least once on tunes that stem back to her days as a teenager. Indeed, amid an age where countless musicians capitalize on nostalgia by replicating widely known albums in their entirety onstage, Spektor's deep dive felt brave and unique. On a tour that visited just three cities, she begins by playing her 'Songs' record in an order that doesn't usually mirror the original sequence. Granted access to a friend's recording studio on Christmas Day 2001, Spektor completed the album in one take. Technically released in 2002 and sold only at her shows, the self-issued effort soon faded away to become a kind of aural curio. Renowned engineer Bob Ludwig came out of retirement to master it for proper release and its streaming debut last November. Long removed from the days of hawking $10 CDs of 'Songs' out of a backpack, Spektor spent the past 20 or so years charting a course that positions her as one of the most 'indie' artists remaining on a major-label roster. Prevented from greater fame mainly because of the eccentricities that fuel her ingenuity, she exists as a throwback to when big labels would still weigh the importance of craftsmanship and originality against the desire for massive sales. Having throttled back her professional schedule over the last decade, Spektor now seems more of an outlier than ever. Her consistently strong output — including two self-released efforts, six studio records, a live outing and several contributions to high-profile soundtracks — and slowed pace suggest the approach of a musician who does things on her own terms. Wearing a shiny dress and vibrant red lipstick, and primarily seated at a grand piano, Spektor followed her own muse at the Pilsen venue. Even, at times, reluctantly, as with certain 'Songs' tracks, she regretted writing too many words and devising an abundance of chords. Off-the-cuff and borderline giddy, her self-reflections provided comedic relief and contextual background. At one point, while wrestling with her youthful compositions, Spektor acknowledged their erratic nature and joked she shouldn't have to face her past self. Witnessing the singer-pianist examine her roots without the aid of edits, accompaniment or technology was fascinating and insightful. Spektor's agile vocals and clever lyrics supplied plenty of reasons to grant her latitude. Even when she navigated songs that resembled half-finished sketches ('Lulliby'). Or recited the ingredients of a fruit jar ('Reading Time with Pickle'), made false starts ('Aching to Pupate') and furiously hunted for the right piano notes after flubbing a transition and bringing everything to a full stop ('Lacrimosa'). Could Spektor benefit from better preparation? Sure, though refinement and stuffed-shirt professionalism would've smoothed the rough edges of offbeat songs that thrived on spontaneity, uncertainty and whimsy. Working from memory, and dealing with the awkward consequences when it failed, the singer equated her vulnerable interpretations of the zig-zagging pieces to riding a roller coaster without a safety harness. Aptly, Spektor's elastic voice and tempo command supplied an endless path of twists, loops, dips, rolls, stalls, spirals and drops. She expanded traditional pop parameters with architecture that frequently changed direction without notice and, once the detours were mapped, reverted to the initial patterns just as quickly. Her malleable piano arrangements reconceptualized lullabies, ballads, shuffles and torch songs. Demonstrated on the casual 'Bobbing for Apples' and rubbery 'That Time' — examples of her flair for observation and ability to express significant themes couched in narratives that otherwise appear to address routine matters — Spektor's crude guitar strumming served as a weak substitute for her keyboard prowess. She handled basic percussion, such as whacking a drum stick against a wooden chair on the scolding 'Poor Little Rich Boy' or tapping her hand on the piano lid during a surprisingly solemn 'Better,' with more authority. Nothing outshined what Spektor accomplished with her voice. Especially evident on five songs stripped of their wider-scale pop-rock instrumentation, her varied deliveries transformed vowels, consonants, pitches and accents into a novel language. She played games of hop-scotch with pronunciation devices, stretched short phrases into lengthy passages, dangled notes akin to the way a puppeteer controls strings from above. Limited only by possibility, Spektor used her dynamic voice to mimic the tooting of car horns; soft shimmering of hi-hat cymbals; frustrations of muttered curses; rhythms of a hip-hop beat; airiness of pursed lips; praise retching of sudden nausea. Whether adhering to gentle tones, firing off sentences as rapid-fire streams, inventing mashed-up terms, rapping cadences or employing subtle shifts in volume to alter meaning, she created colorful universes stitched together by zany imagination, escapist fantasy and grown-up romanticism. May her innocent sense of child-like wonder never dim. Bob Gendron is a freelance critic. Setlist from Thalia Hall March 2: 'Prisoners' 'Reading Time with Pickle' 'Oedipus' 'Bon Idée' 'Aching to Pupate' 'Lounge' 'Daniel Cowman' 'Lacrimosa' 'Consequence of Sounds' 'Lulliby' 'Samson' 'Ne Me Quitte Pas' 'Loveology' 'Baby Jesus' 'Two Birds' 'Aquarius' 'Better' 'Bobbing for Apples' 'That Time' Encore 'Poor Little Rich Boy' 'Fidelity'
