Education Quote by Regina Spektor

Spektor is doing two things at once here: praising the past and quietly defending her right to be difficult. Calling other artists work a "gift" sounds generous, but its real function is permission. If you inherit a library of "brilliant, great people", you are not obligated to keep your songwriting inside the tiny, market-tested box of radio-friendly simplicity. Tradition becomes a lever, not a museum.

The key phrase is "draw on". She frames influence as resource rather than constraint: you can sample literature, classical harmony, folk narrative, weird chord changes, stray images, and build a pop song that behaves like a short story. That is her lane, and she is making it sound not pretentious but practical. Why pretend you're inventing music from scratch when you can start further down the road?

Then comes the sharper edge: "you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs". It's not just a technical complaint about harmony. It's a critique of an industry aesthetic, where sameness is disguised as accessibility. Three chords stand in for creative risk management: the belief that listeners should be catered to, not challenged.

"I don't really like that kind of writing" lands with deliberate understatement. She doesn't call it bad; she calls it not for her, which is both diplomatic and dismissive. The subtext is autonomy: complexity isn't a flex, it's an artistic ethic, and she refuses to apologize for wanting more than the easiest version of a song.