Ghost of Corporate Future

About three hours into the five and a half hour drive to Cape Cod I wore out my go-to CDs and popped in a mix my brother made for me. My brother and I share a love for music, but I will admit that at times our tastes desperately clash.

Ben Folds is to my brother what Jeff Buckley is to me.

He has Ben Harper, I have Stevie Wonder...(although we shared a beautiful sibling moment after a choir concert of his when he was in middle school where he performed, but had never heard "Sir Duke." I'll never forget the look on his face when I laid "Songs in the Key of Life" onto the record player to show him just what exactly it was he had been singing. I've never seen a smile like when he first heard those horns, and he couldn't believe that his choir teacher hadn't played the song for them before they were asked to perform it. It was a tacit musical joy we shared that evening).

I admit that most of the songs on the CD I skipped. But not only did I not skip "Ghost of Corporate Future" by Regina Spektor, I played it on repeat four times.

I'd never heard this woman before, but she reminded me of Bjork, except with a happy sarcasm.

Apparently Regina Spektor has already gotten pretty big, I'm usually the last to know about these sorts of things. The newest of her three CDs "Begin to Hope" is her first on a major label and was given a 7.5 on Pitchfork.

But "Ghost of Corporate Future" is off of her album "Soviet Kitch" a minor release.

I read that she's playing Bonnaroo, and Lollapalooza, and so probably doesn't need this seriously huge press I'm giving her, but that's life.

Unfortunately all of the songs I have heard off of her new album are too much for me to handle more than ten seconds of (although after hearing "Ghost of Corporate Future" I forced myself to go back and listen to "Sampson" which my brother also included on the CD. Admittedly the song gets exponentially better around 00:35, though the version included on "Begin to Hope" lacks the energy of the version my brother put on my mix).

There are times when her music sounds like the clone-female-musician that crowds the seats of open mics and chokes the radio waves. It may be a horrible analagy, and I've probably been spending too much time in the garden but her songs are like weeds. Some should be pulled, tossed in the bin, burned even (though burning things I normally do not advocate, except for candles, wood, and the occasional credit card statement). But then there are the ones that have flowered before you've gotten to them, and they're so lovely, and they grow on their own without your planting of them, and they spread, and you don't mind, in fact, it's downright wonderful.

I'm not sure what I think about Ms. Spektor as a whole, and I think that it's too late for me to continue thinking about it, and in fact I most likely won't come back to thinking about it. But "Ghost of Corporate Future" is a great song. And worth listening to at least four times.