Regina Spektor’s piano is not firewood yet

You may not pick up on it right away but Regina Spektor’s kind of a specialist when it comes to get-up-off-the-mat music. Jock jams for the heart. Not all the time, but more often than you think. Subtle, astute get-over-it anthems, sprinkled among all the asymmetrical tales about being loved, about no longer being loved, about the simmering rage of the allegedly unlovable.

Several of these pretty little fight songs made it into the setlist when the Russian-born/Bronx-based singer-songwriter graced the stage at The Met on Saturday night.

Regina Spektor at The Met | photo by Patrick Rapa

Most notably, most poignantly, there’s “Firewood” from 2012’s What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, featuring a hopeful mantra for a songwriter in crisis: “The piano is not firewood yet,” she tells us several times, and while that “yet” forces us to consider the inevitable, it’s got the potency of the present tense.

Rise from your cold hospital bed
I’ll tell you you’re not dying
Everyone knows you’re going to live
So you might as well start trying

Oof. One wonders which person, real or imagined, earned this outburst of tough love. Let’s hope it worked.

In the last line, Spektor concedes a lesser point:

Everyone knows you’re going to love
Though there’s still no cure for crying

Another crowd favorite, one also laced with the gloom of the medical, is “One More Time with Feeling,” from the 2009 record Far. It’s about a slow recovery in hard times, and offers a twist on that old romantic battle cry “This is why we fight.” I know that phrase from several favorite songs — by the Decemberists, Quasi, probably more — but its origins elude me, and the search results are depressing.

Regina Spektor at The Met | photo by Patrick Rapa

From Spektor’s lips, the “why” is personal survival, and for love. To my mind, it’s everybody in the hospital room silently willing you to come back to them. Anybody who’s been through such a loss knows it’s all you can do. Sometimes it’s enough to know that somebody fought to stay around. Grief sucks, she’s not saying it doesn’t.

There are more songs like this in the RS catalog, and in Saturday’s set, ones that want to lift you up, dust you off and remind you that this thing ain’t done. You’ll find them if you look, and even if you don’t, it might sneak up on you.

Moodwise, the Met show was intimate and casual, though Spektor was delightfully dolled up in a shiny dress she compared to a foil candy wrapper — one she donned to match the grandeur of this lovely old opera house. The song selection was career-spanning, mood-swinging, gorgeously unpredictable, but always warm, always in-the-moment.

Inspired by a visit to the Weitzman the previous day, she performed the traditional prayer song “Avinu Malkeinu” in Hebrew. The ancient and insane “Chemo Limo,” from 2003’s Soviet Kitsch, as always, felt like some spellbinding novel bonsai’d down to its emotional essence. “Somedays” and “Summer in the City” and “Raindrops” and “All Alone” — winners all.

Blue was a recurring color. God, a recurring character. She sang “Eet,” a song about the existential discomfort of forgetting the words to your favorite song, and then briefly blanked on how to start a second verse of some other old favorite further down the set list. “I’ve written too many words,” she chuckled. And long before she sang “You’ll take the clock off of your wall,” she asked the Met crew to turn off a clock in the wings only she could see, its digital display unnecessary thanks to the tiny timepiece she brought with her to the piano. Little moments of whimsy.

The evening ended with a murderer’s row of field-tested Regina Spektor favorites: “Us,” “Better,” and “Fidelity,” with “Samson” as the encore to send us home humming and thinking how the stars are just old light.

Regina Spektor at The Met | photo by Patrick Rapa