EXPECT Regina Spektor to burst into her native Russian tongue tonight at Leeds City Varieties.

"It feels so good inside my body," reasons the singer-songwriter, who escaped the Soviet Union with her musical parents at the age of nine and settled in the Bronx, New York.

It was here that she developed her idiosyncratic style of writing songs not about her own life but about what her imagination conjured up. "It's almost like putting a ball and chain around your foot and being sentenced to being yourself," she says of songwriters who do choose the autobiographical option. "Who the hell wants to be themselves all the time? It's so boring."

Her own genre is a mixture of classical, folk, Russian music and hip hop, as heard on her latest album, Begin To Hope, released last week by Warner Music. The record is said to be more accessible than her previous works but does not deviate from her distinctive characteristics: her extraordinary voice and piano playing.

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