“Laughing With” by Regina Spektor

"Laughing With" led off Regina Spektor's fifth album, Far, in 2009, first surfacing on her MySpace page before its digital release in May. Jacknife Lee produced it, Michael Brauer mixed it, and Spektor sits at the piano singing her own words and music.

The strings are her arrangement, and she skipped the standard quartet: two cellos, from Nick Holland and Katherine Jenkinson, give it the low, warm bottom she says she has always gravitated toward, with Jeremy Isaac and Sonia Slany on violin, Slany on viola too, and Dave Price on drums. In June a physical EP paired it with "Folding Chair", "The Call" from the soundtrack of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and a live take of "The Noise". Years later it turned up in an episode of The Leftovers.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.