Crucial Track for February 5, 2026

"That Time" by Regina Spektor

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#365songs (36 / 365)

A recent entry got the concept of "The end! No moral" songs in my head, I guess, and then Regina Spektor's breakthrough track "Fidelity" came up on shuffle in a friend's car when they were giving me a ride home. At least, I assume "Fidelity" was her breakthrough: it's the first time I ever heard of her, and it was when I was working at Trader Joe's. Nothing says "breakthrough" like hearing a song at Trader Joe's. Or Starbucks. And "Fidelity" is exactly the kind of extremely-palatable-but-slightly-quirky song that seems like it was made for TJ's/Sbux uptake. But I still think it's pretty good! It got me to check out Begin to Hope, anyway.

Begin to Hope kind of has manic pixie dream girl vibes, and I'd guess they're pretty divisive. Certainly, for me, some of them don't work, for example: the cutesy faux-British pronunciation of "better" in the bridge of "Fidelity" and the even worse infantile one in the verse of "Better." "I — oof! — must go on standing" in the otherwise serious "Après Moi." But more of them do: "summer in the city / means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage" in "Summer in the City," complaining about the length of "November Rain"'s solo in "On the Radio,"' pretty much all of "That Time."

Like... pretty much 90% of "That Time" is a series of manic pixie dream girl clichés and fixations. Aside from that, it's a song that plays to few of Regina Spektor's strengths: none of her deft piano playing — no piano at all, in fact — and none of the sweet upper register of her voice. The song structure is like this: Verse. Verse. Verse. Verse. It's insubstantial, except when it feints at a turn for the serious at the beginning of verse 4, only to go ricocheting off it at maximum speed like it just touched a hot stove. Maybe there's something to be gleaned here but my overwhelming impression is: The end! No moral. There's something about these weird short vignette-y songs that just speaks to me. It doesn't necessarily say anything I really needed to hear. But when I heard "Fidelity" for the first time in a decade, "That Time" was the next song from Begin to Hope that I thought of.