Growing up in Moscow, what music were you listening to?
I've realized I have these three pillars that were established in my childhood as far as music. The first and huge pillar is classical music. That was the very first thing that I ever listened to. My mom was a conservatory professor and she played piano, and both her and my dad played classical music. My dad played in an orchestra into his twenties – he played violin – so there was a lot of classical music in my life. The only concerts that I would ever go and hear were classical, and it was my favorite treat to get to see ballet and opera. They were really valued in the Soviet Union and everybody had them in their life. I don't know if it was just the major cities, but in Moscow it was, and I know in St. Petersburg (at that time, Leningrad) it was also a huge part of everybody's life. The other music that was super-duper huge in my life was the fact that my dad was an avid collector of underground, forbidden music from the West. He was part of a community of people who were always sneaking music in and trading. We obviously had a ton of The Beatles and Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, and we had a lot of Italian and French music of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Whatever anybody could get their hands on. I was listening to everything. Because it was this underground sneaky other world, everything was almost like a mix tape. To this day, I have no idea what's on what album, I just know all of The Beatles. People were trying to make room and use every part of the cassette tape, so they would puzzle things based on the math of it, like how much could fit per side. I don't think we had any in our house, but a fascinating thing for people to know, if they don't already, is that in Soviet Russia, because The Beatles were so beloved and yet nothing came out officially, people had a lot of vinyl that was cut onto old X-rays. When Paul McCartney first came to Russia to play, people were asking him to sign their records, and it would be on somebody's broken hip! It was not high fidelity material for sure, it was super floppy, but you could still cut music into it and have those songs in your life. The third pillar was also very unofficial music by Soviet bards, and those were like [Vladimir] Vysotsky, [Bulat] Okudzhava, [Yuri] Visbor, [Sergey] Nikitin, and all these people who were these incredible brilliant songwriters. Usually, it would be a person accompanying themselves with a guitar and singing very simply, and the lyrics were some of the most incredible songs I have ever heard ‘til this day. On every topic in every way, especially luminaries like Vysotsky – who was a brilliant, brilliant actor and died very young – but he was the most beloved singer/songwriter of all of Soviet Russia. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs, and each one of them a masterpiece. Okudzhava, who was older than Vysotsky and had fought in World War II, was this Georgian singer/songwriter, and he wrote these incredible songs. A lot of them were about the war and from different perspectives, but those were the people that made me realize that you could write a song about anything in the world, and it's all open to you. Anything is possible, there's nothing off limits, and you could be any character. So, those are my three pillars that I stand on every day.
Where do you see the influence of your childhood listening show up?
I'm sure it's showing up in everything. I know playing all those pieces on piano and listening to that much classical music is just through and through. It's the symbolic language or something. In a lot of ways, I guess whatever skills you learn become the tools of your self-expression. So, if somebody learns carpentry, then their self-expression is going to come through carpentry. If somebody learns how to be a surgeon, their self-expression has to come through that. Whatever it is that you have as a skill in this world comes through. If you have a limited vocabulary, you're going to only be able to express yourself through those words. If you have a vast vocabulary, you get to have more of those tools. Somebody like Leonardo da Vinci, who was an expert in so many fields, his self-expression could travel through all those fields. I've met so many incredible musicians. I have friends who can hear something and just play it. They can play any jazz; they can figure out how to play any Beatles song. I don't have those skills. I'm not the kind of musician that somebody would want in their band. But what I think happens is whatever it is that I have played, and have listened to, and still continue to take in, ends up somehow becoming a part of my self-expression. If I learn a little bit more, then I get to have that little bit more. That's the wonderful inspiration to learn more and try more, because then I get to express that much more of my own self through whatever I learn. Processing and then expressing. It doesn't necessarily have to be anything from my childhood; it could be something from what I observed at a bus stop yesterday. But the skills to express that thing have to come from the things that I learned in childhood or adolescence.
I had a younger brother that played the Beach Boys in the house all the time. I was listening to much different music at the time, but that music penetrated my psyche and now it's something that I love and cherish. I find it interesting that the things that maybe you weren't even truly listening to as a fan end up seeping into what you become.
I do get it now. I think that there were maybe a lot of things that I wasn't actively listening to on purpose, but they were around me. Even coming to America and hearing a lot of American rock that didn't make it to me, or things on the radio. And definitely in my neighborhood, just listening to a lot of Latin music coming from out of cars or out of apartments, and all those rhythms coming into me. In a lot of ways, we're really porous, and I don't think it matters what the genre is. What matters is the quality. If something comes in contact with you, and it's on a certain level, your entire system goes ”Wow!," and you have this wonder about it. If people are open enough. A lot of the time we decide the value of something based on our own taste and preference, and we forget that we are very limited, and sometimes our palate does need to be expanded. I went through that when I was a teenager. My dad used to work at Cornell University Medical College, and he was doing scientific photography for them for their medical and surgical research. They had these free concerts where incredible classical musicians would come through, and all these people in scrubs with beepers would come in and listen for an hour on their lunch break. This amazing pianist was coming, and my mom snuck me out of high school. She said I was sick and I got to go to this concert. It was amazing, but we had this full-on argument on the way home where there was this late, maybe one of the last Beethoven piano sonatas, and I was like, “It was terrible” because my ear was not used to more modern classical music, which is shows you how ahead of his time Beethoven was. I had a hard time the first time I listened to Bartok. It felt crazy to me. I was saying this to my mom, and she was like, “You don't understand it yet,” and I was like, “Of course I understand it. I don't even want to understand that. It's bullshit!” And she was like, “Okay. You’ll learn to get it later.” And I did. I fell in love later. That's some of my favorite music. I had to listen to a bunch of it, and then one day I absolutely fell in love. Maybe it was the prepared piano pieces of John Cage, something where I had an out-of-body experience listening to it. Had I remained closed to it, and been like, “Oh, it's not for me," I would have never been able to expand to it. But it's not necessarily easy. Certain frequencies in metal are hard like that. That high end is hard on me. That's not my happy place in my body. I love things that don't have that particular timbre. But once you build up a tolerance, and you work to expand your palate very consciously, if you get lucky and you listen to something wonderful you don't have to work at it – you just love it and then you're the richer for it. It doesn't mean you have to be so porous that you are Pollyanna and love everything, but if you're honest with yourself, you push yourself a little bit, you don't make your ear lazy, and you don't just relax into a, “Well I know what I like, and what I don't like,” you stand to win a lot because you can expand your sonic palate, or taste, or color, or architectural, or social or any palette. I think music is a gateway to a lot of those expansions.
I love that you were able to have a meaningful debate with your mom about the music.
She was the one bringing the wisdom and the meaning. I was a teenage idiot, but then I did come back and had my, “You were right.”
To my dad's credit, he used to take us to metal shows and sit through them. He always found something to appreciate about it, which I still look back on favorably. Being open and being able to continue to learn as an adult is important. You get busy with other things, and you don't have that passion or the time to be digging through a record store. I’m a little sad that those times are gone. There's access to everything online, so that little bit of discovery is different.
Yeah, it's overwhelming sometimes because there's so much you almost do have to dig. Except I do think that something about when the digging becomes sort of motionless. You scroll dig, right? But there is something to touching a record, or flipping through them, and picking things up, and reading the little things, and seeing how it feels. It's almost like people get that somewhere else maybe when they're picking a potted plant to put in their apartment. You pick one, or a pet, but you don't get to do that with music anymore.
