#45, “On the Radio,” Regina Spektor (2006)

150 Favorite Songs: #45, “On the Radio,” Regina Spektor (2006)

There’s such a bounciness to “On the Radio” that you could mistake it for a lighthearted pop song. There’s a simple three-chord piano riff that repeats, sometimes on the actual piano and sometimes sung by Regina Spektor as a “bah-buh-bum, buh-bum.” There are jokes about Guns ’n Roses and “November Rain” and an outro that involves her singing the words “on the radio! uh-oh!” as the song fades out, leaving only hand-claps and a vocal riff where she goes “ah, ah, uh-ah-ah-ah.” It’s all very cute and quirky and expertly crafted as an upbeat earworm that you could almost miss the fact that it’s an extremely poignant meditation on the meaning of life, articulated beautifully, veering from metaphor to jokes to plainspokenness in a way that feels very much like the way wisdom, I think, manifests itself when we actually see it.

It starts with the metaphor, a series of dreamlike images playing out over the loping pop elements, Spektor singing about a funeral that leaves everyone she’s with laughing, climate change melting the world around them and worms dying and bees living forever, the haunting specter of disease both behind and before them, until suddenly it’s the chorus, and she’s awake again. Not just awake, but listening to the radio, where “November Rain” is playing, and then plays again, because this time it’s the DJ who’s asleep. It all sounds a bit ridiculous and abstract, a silliness that maybe aspires to profundity, or maybe the reverse.

But there’s a vulnerability to it that elevates that part of the song. It’s in the way that Spektor—who has one of the great voices in pop music, capable of hitting any note but tinged with her slight Eastern European accent—delivers the lines to make them human and real and idiosyncratic. A less confident performer would shy away from those things in favor of simply singing as well as she’s capable of, would let her voice rise the way the song wants it to rise when she sings “we listened to it twice / cuz the DJ was asleep” instead of restraining herself and bringing it down to a quick hush by the end of the line, like she’s suddenly concerned about waking the poor DJ.

Then the second verse comes around, and I will not lie to you, I have ripped off the staccato rhythm that Regina Spektor uses there to starkly outline what she has learned about life many times since I first heard this song in 2006.

this is how it works:
you’re young until you’re not
you love until you don’t
you try until you can’t
you laugh until you cry
you cry until you laugh
and everyone must breathe
until their dying breath

There’s a confidence to her delivery, a stridency to it, that I find irresistible (yes, please, tell me how it works! I would like to know! Good lord, would I like to know), a determination to state the big questions and provide them with the simplest, truest of answers. How long are you young? Until you’re not. How long does love last? Until it doesn’t? How long should you try? Until you can’t. You will feel joy and you will feel sadness, and you will breathe through it all, because we all do, until we no longer breathe, and then that is the end. I adore the directness of her writing in this verse, the willingness to make the things that have kept humans awake and worried for as long as there have been humans to lie awake and worry, seem answerable. Are those answers satisfying? Depends, I guess, on how much specificity you really need, but I’ve always found them clarifying. When I’ve borrowed that rhythm, my goal has always been: How can I say several true things, expressed meaningfully, in five words each? Because that’s what she does here.

Then, of course, she second-guesses what she just said, contradicts herself, because there’s more to it than you can say in five words. The third verse flows directly out of the second, as the bounciness begins to fade just a bit, and she sings one of the better verses anyone ever wrote about the nature of love, how it starts with you looking inside of yourself for the things you like, and then shine those things into the parts of yourself you love. “and then you take that love you made / and stick it into someone else’s heart / pumping someone else’s blood,” hopeful that it is safe there but also hopeful that, if it turns out not to be, you can do this forever and ever, at least until you can’t.

And then, because offering hard-won wisdom is scary and vulnerable, we’re back to the radio station, once more listening to “November Rain,” once more listening to Slash play his solos and appreciating the simplicity and wisdom that Axl has to offer in the refrain, which he never expressed quite as beautifully as Spektor does, but which still isn’t nothing: Sometimes it’s “nothing lasts forever […] in the cold November rain,” and sometimes it’s “nothing lasts forever / even cold November rain,” and you can hear that over and over again, because sometimes the DJ is asleep. And this time, when she sings that line, she lets her voice soar, because sometimes you need to wake up, too, and get on with things.

That’s a lot for a song that runs just a smidge over three minutes, and it’s why I love “On the Radio” so much. Regina Spektor has a lot to say, and on this one, she found both the most direct and most circuitous ways to say it. It feels like courage to put your silliness and your vulnerability and your wisdom and your hope and your fear all in the same song, to let that song be a poppy little number where you sometimes sing the piano riff under your breath. Ultimately, that’s how it works: your vulnerability is your strength. your silliness is your wisdom. your hope is your fear. and putting that in a pop song is how you show you’re brave.