In Praise of Adventurous Music

The Arendt Center's Senior Fellow, Wyatt Mason, has a piece in today's New York Times about the singer and songwriter, Regina Spektor. Spektor, who hails from Russia, and now lives in New York City, will be releasing her sixth album, "What We Saw From the Cheap Seats" on May 29. The musician has strong opinions on music as an art form:

A lot of it comes from the fact that people don’t listen to adventurous music. It doesn’t mean that you won’t write a simple, pure pop song. But that I think is the difference between the Beatles and Queen and all these awesome bands. You could hear that they were listening to Irish music and classical music and jazz and rock ’n’ roll and blues and also symphony. It’s all in there.

Later in the article, Spektor continues:

I love worlds that are so complete that you just can relax,” Spektor said, “because when the art is that complete, it makes something in me just calm. But a lot of new things . . . there’s this tension. I’ll take everything that is awesome from it and leave everything that I don’t like. It can be an uneven piece and still worth it. But you put on ‘Rubber Soul,’ or ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ or ‘Freewheeling Bob Dylan’ and it’s just . . . solid. From the first note you hear, it never goes wrong. Why can’t everything be like that?