Song: "Samson"Artist: Regina Spektor
Album: Begin To Hope
Year: 2006
Label: Sire
Highest Billboard Chart Position: Album Cut; Begin To Hope peaked at #19
Players: Regina Spektor - singer, songwriter, piano, co-producer; David Kahne - producer
Regina Spektor is probably crazy. She is most definitely Russian, quite probably lives in Brooklyn and is undoubtedly talented at songwriting.
I first learned of her existence through VH1, where I get a lot of my musical knowledge. "Fidelity" was a new video, and I was loving the black and white themed look, the oddly endearing vocals and the interviews in which she discussed being inspired by art and literature. I knew I needed to know this girl, find out what her music was all about. I bought Begin To Hope and have had it in heavy rotation on my car stereo ever since. It sits behind ABBA Gold and Relient K's Two Lefts Don't Make A Right... But Three Do as the longest continuous appearance in my car's CD wallet. Despite the obvious pop appeal of "Better" and "Fidelity," it was the gorgeous ballad "Samson" that had me hooked.
The lyrics of "Samson" owe a huge debt to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" The genius re-writing of biblical story to tell a tale of heartbreak is very similar, I used both songs (the k.d. lang version of "Hallelujah") on Sweetest Downfall: A Broken Hearted Mix Tape. The mixtape's title comes from the line "You are my sweetest downfall/I loved you first" which opens the track over a simple piano. In the song, which also appears on Regina's out of print album Songs from 2002, Regina's strong voice weaves among the piano and a few strings, singing about Samson, whose hair she cut, who couldn't bring the columns down, remembering that "the history books forgot about us/and the Bible didn't mention us/not even once" Those lines stand in direct opposition to the grandiosity of "Us" a single from her major label debut Soviet Kitsch, in which she proclaims "they made a statue of us." This was a quieter love affair, one where Samson eats a slice of Wonder Bread and went back to bed.
The track was used in an episode of CSI:New York, and was an NPR "Song of The Day."
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