Regina Spektor, “Home, before and after.”

Regina Spektor recorded her new album, Home, before and after, away from home. She had holed up in a cabin in Upstate New York and recorded alone in a converted church, sending her work to coproducer John Congleton on the West Coast. Her time there was fruitful, yielding a set of lush, vibrant songs that are, like Spektor herself, beautiful and a little strange but totally original.

The album starts ambitiously with a song that’s augmented mightily by an orchestra (in Macedonia!), “Becoming All Alone,” on which Spektor muses about getting a beer with God and laments the state of the world by way of a taxi metaphor: “Let the ones who don’t care feel a thrill/ And I just want to ride/ But this whole world/ It makes me carsick/ Stop the meter, sir/ You have a heart/ Why don’t you use it?”

“Up the Mountain” brings instrumentation and a sense of drama that are both reminiscent of a Bollywood hit, using a hypnotic repetition of lyrics. “Gotta get in there,” Spektor repeats like a mantra as the track begins. The song then proceeds like a matryoshka, opening only to reveal another doll, as she sings, “In the ocean, there’s a mountain/ On the mountain, there’s a forest/ In the forest, there’s a garden.” There’s always somewhere further to go: plucking a flower, drinking its nectar, finding the answer within.

With “One Man’s Prayer,” Spektor plays a trick on the listener, creating a spritely pop melody and a character study that starts out like a fellow who seems sweet if slightly misguided: “I just want some girl to talk to me/ And tell me I’m different or say that I’m the same/ I don’t care what she thinks, just think of me.” Then the song takes a turn for the darker, and the listener realizes it might as well be called “Incel’s Prayer,” as Spektor sings resolutely, “I just want some girl beneath my feet/ To tell me I’m her king/ And then beg me for a ring/ And I want her to be afraid of me/ And think that I might leave her.” This is the kind of piercing, insightful song that, while written from a man’s point of view, needs to be sung by a woman. If a man were to sing it, the irony would probably be lost on many.

If “Raindrops” sounds more like classic Regina Spektor, that’s because it is. She wrote it years ago, but apparently felt this album was the time to bring it back. “Raindrops” benefits from a simple arrangement with horns and strings that centers her voice and piano playing, and reminds one just how exceptional Spektor is at both. Fans who’d been bootlegging this one will probably be glad to finally have an official version.

“Sugar Man” is (perhaps disappointingly to some) not a cover of the 1970 Rodriguez song of the same name, but it does have a great laidback groove and a sticky little chorus of layered vocals singing, “Sugar man, sugar daddy.” It’s sweet but not terribly substantial, as the name would suggest.

“Sickness and flowers go together/ Bombing and shelters go together,” Spektor notes in just two of many such pairings on “What Might Have Been.” A show-tune feel to this song reminds one that Spektor was recently on Broadway. In the beforetimes, she played a five-night residency at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York, and when she sings “Loving and leaving,” it’s with a decidedly theatrical flourish.

The album takes a fascinating detour on “Spacetime Fairy Mix,” a nearly nine-minute epic that conjures up the grandeur of Prokofiev. “The fairy tale’s begun/ So listen up, my son,” Spektor sings. It reaches a foreboding climax before the mood lightens. Suddenly, the music sounds like how it feels when the sun emerges from the clouds; warm and bright, before then fading out.

Regina Spektor, ever the storyteller, tells a tale on “Coin” of giving a coin to a shaman, a scientist and a president, only to find that “love is enough,” when she gives it to a loved one. The verses have a simple, Carole King kind of a feel, while the chorus goes big with a Pink-Floyd-esque prog rock bombast.

The album falters a bit on “Loveology,” where Spektor repeats a wish to go to the movies over insistent piano before going into a list of nonsensical “ologies” – “porcupine-ology,” “forgive me-ology,” to name just a few – and then reproaches a class to sit down in her best teacher voice. One could forgive the class for getting a bit restless during this meandering song.

Synth accents dance under the piano on “Through the Door,” a somber but fitting final track, on which Spektor sings, “Home is where the light’s on/ No matter how long you’ve been gone.”

There’s no individual song on Home, before and after that’s as catchy as “Fidelity” or as urgent as “All the Rowboats,” but those who liked Remember Us to Life will find much to enjoy here from an always-creative artist.

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