From wikipedia:
“Spektor has said that she has created a great number of songs but rarely writes any of them down. She has also stated that she never aspired to write songs herself, but songs seem to just flow to her. Spektor’s songs are not usually autobiographical but are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination. Her songs show influences from folk, punk, rock, Jewish, Russian, hip hop, jazz, and classical music. Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole:

“It doesn’t feel natural for me to write some diary type song. I want to write a classic like Yesterday but weird songs about meatballs in refrigerators come into my head – I can’t help it.”

Spektor has a broad vocal range and uses the full extent of it. She also explores a variety of different and somewhat unorthodox vocal techniques, such as verses composed entirely of buzzing noises made with the lips and beatbox-style flourishes in the middle of ballads, and also makes use of such unusual musical techniques as using a drum stick to tap rhythms on the body of the piano or chair.Part of her style also results from the exaggeration of certain aspects of vocalization, most notably the glottal stop, prominent in the single “Fidelity“. She also uses a strong New York accent on some words, which she has said is due to her love of New York and its culture.

Her lyrics are equally eclectic, often taking the form of abstract narratives or first-person character studies, similar to short stories or vignettes put to song. Spektor usually sings in English, though she sometimes includes a few words or verses of Latin, Russian, French, and other languages in her songs. She also plays with pronunciations, which she said on a NPR interview to be a remnant of her early years when she listened to pop in English without understanding the lyrics. Some of Spektor’s lyrics include literary allusions, such as: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in “Poor Little Rich Boy”; The Little Prince in “Baobabs”; Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood in “Paris”; Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare in “Pound of Flesh”; Shakespeare’s Hamlet in “The Virgin Queen”; Boris Pasternak in “Après Moi”; Samson and Delilah in “Samson”; Oedipus the King in “Oedipus”; Billie Holiday in “Lady”; Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome in “2.99-cent blues”; and the Beatles and Paul McCartney in the song “Edit”. She also used a line from Joni Mitchell’s “California” in her song “The Devil Came to Bethlehem”. Recurring themes and topics in Spektor’s lyrics include love, death, religion (particularly Biblical and Jewish references), city life (particularly New York references), and certain key phrases which recur in different songs, such as references togravediggers, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the name “Mary Ann”. Spektor’s use of satire is evident in “Wasteside”, which refers to The Twelve Chairs, the classic satirical novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov, and describes the town in which people are born, get their hair cut, and then are sent to the cemetery.

In Spektor’s early albums, many of her tracks had a very dry vocal production, with very little reverb or delay added. However, Spektor’s more recent albums, particularly Begin to Hope, have put more emphasis into song production and have relied more on traditional pop and rock instruments. Spektor says the records that most impact her are those of “bands whose music is really involved”, specifically namingthe Beatles, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Radiohead, Tom Waits, and Frédéric Chopin as primary influences.”