KEY POINTS:
While waiting to meet Regina Spektor, I wonder which incarnation of the singer-songwriter I am going to encounter.
Will it be the sassy tomboy who glares sidelong from the front of her album Soviet Kitsch, military hat at a rakish angle, enormous lips wrapped around an oversized bottle
of beer?
Will it be the vamp from Begin to Hope, dark hair curling around one eye, lipsticked mouth glistening in black and white?
Will it be the Regina who crept onstage in Oxford's cavernous Town Hall, whispering apologetically into her microphone to a thousand hushed strangers?
Or will it be the one who thumped raptures out of her piano, beating time with a drumstick on a chair and hurling out a voice that made the backs of our scalps tingle?
Her transformations are startling.
It is a weary Spektor who greets me. It is almost her birthday, and for the second year running she is spending it in a foreign hotel room.
In the block next door, a white net curtain flutters hopefully out of the only open window, and she is entranced by it. "Look at that," she says, her eyes as wide as those of a child who is fighting off sleep. "It's just too beautiful. It's, like, this great balance that's happening."
She sounds surprisingly like a hippie for the hero of the New York anti-folk movement, for a girl whose music is such a novel mix of jazz, rock and punk.
But Spektor is not exclusive when it comes to style - whether musical or personal.
Being on stage "requires what it requires", she says. "Somebody might be a quiet, tea-drinking gentleman who is very polite and nice but he's an actor and he plays Macbeth.
"When I play, it's all real emotions and real empathies, but certain things are summoned that just don't need to be summoned in everyday life. I don't order tea in a restaurant the same way I would sing Poor Little Rich Boy, you know?"
A good thing she doesn't. Poor Little Rich Boy is the song in which she bashes the life out of her piano stool with a drumstick while she plays, rattling out the words: "You don't love your girlfriend/ You don't love your girlfriend/ And you think that you should but she thinks that she's fat/ But she isn't but you don't love her anyway".
I'm shocked, then, that some people dare to heckle her. When she toured with The Strokes in 2003, she had to deal with "show us your tits" moments, she says.
Later, backstage, she burst into tears. "Because I'm a sensitive person I felt so hurt by it and I felt like a failure." But The Strokes gave her some better advice: attack is the best form of defence. "Now, if anybody says something, I'll be like, 'Up you.' "
You get the impression that the sensitive Spektor was not born to the rock'n'roll lifestyle. She was born in Russia and learned classical piano. She was an only child until she was 10, which could explain why she became such a one-woman band, making percussion with her mouth (and that drumstick) while singing and playing simultaneously. She longed to make it as a professional pianist.
"In the very beginning when I started writing songs and playing shows I felt like I was very lucky that I was getting to do music. But it was a very backdoor entrance into it. And the front door would be classical music." She read, she studied - a real nerd. And she had such awed respect for classical music that she didn't dare to improvise. People like her did not write words. Pushkin did, and Shakespeare.
It was only when she picked up a guitar that she dared to experiment. Her astonishing singing voice was irrelevant at first. "For a long time I thought, 'I only sing because I have to, because I write. I'm a piano-player, writer, and a singer very last - when I have to.'
"But people would say: 'Your voice, your voice.' I was like, 'I'll just have to accept it, I'm a singer.' "
Her family moved to New York when she was 10, a good age, she says, to take with her a healthy knowledge of her mother culture but at the same time to be open to her new environment. When she first discovered American music she took to it voraciously.
She had to learn English and Hebrew in a hurry and now has a range of languages that she weaves into her songs. "I like to use little bits of things to summon an entirely bigger thing," she says. "A word of Russian or German can imply a whole world or atmosphere."
It is fascinating to hear. The snatch of Russian towards the end of Apres Moi is haunting and triumphant in a way that English could never be. If she could glide so smoothly between American and Russian, perhaps it is second nature to play different roles.
She shows me. "Take French. It's just a mouth noise." She shrugs, says "Pffft," and turns into a French philosopher before my eyes. It is disarming and hilarious.
Her songs are like stories - which is why she called last year's compilation of her earlier work Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and Other Short Stories.
"I definitely feel I'm part of the tradition of the travelling vagabond musician," she says. But if you try to find the real Spektor in the lyrics, you'll struggle.
Samson is narrated, lovingly, by Delilah: "I cut his hair myself one night/ A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light/ And he told me that I'd done all right/ And kissed me till the morning light ... You are my sweetest downfall/ I loved you first."
Summer in the City is a favourite singalong number: "Summer in the city/ Means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage/ And I start to miss you, baby, sometimes."
So is there a Valentine waiting somewhere in the world for her? "I'd rather not speak of it," she squirms. "You're wearing a nice red Valentine's sweater."
When I ask what is next for this beautiful shapeshifter, she goes hippie on me again. "The weather is so unpredictable and we are so unpredictable," she says, dreamily. "I'm quite scared of commitment to any particular genre. I just hope I'll keep enjoying whatever it is I'm doing and be working hard, but slightly less hard than I am right now. I'm a bit overwhelmed."
LOWDOWN
Who: Regina Spektor, this year's Tori Amos/ Fiona Apple/ Martha Wainwright
Born: February 18, 1980, Moscow, Russia
Where you've heard her: Her song Fidelity is behind the Yahoo!-Xtra ad campaign
Albums: 11:11 (2001), Songs (2002), Soviet Kitsch (2004) Begin to Hope (2006)
- INDEPENDENT