“It was considered Soviet property,” Spektor said during a recent interview in a café near her new home in New York City’s West Village. If you listen closely to the song “The Flowers” on her major-label debut, Soviet Kitsch, you can almost hear Spektor whimsically ruminating on her long lost muse: “Things I have loved / I’m allowed to keep. I’ll never know if I go / to sleep.”

The nonconformist chanteuse is on tour in North America through April and has spring dates in Europe and the U.K. as well.

Like her music – a Molotov cocktail of lyrical classical piano compositions, indie rock crescendos, fuzzy guitars and playful piano snippets that sound like traditional Russian folk songs – Spektor isn’t easily categorized.

“I don’t really mean to, but sometimes I will write in code,” said Spektor, 25, revealing a mischievous Cheshire cat grin. Her vocal style is equally anomalous. She tends to leap from the lovely, lyrical part of her voice to rap-talk and, on occasion, a raucous yelp.

And despite the occasional self-effacing giggle, Spektor isn’t shy on stage, either. During one recent show at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom, the curvaceous singer swung an electric guitar over her shoulder and, before an awestruck audience that included her mother, father, aunt, uncle and cousins, unabashedly repeated the salacious lyric, “Someone is (insert naughty verb here) to one of my songs.”

Luckily for Spektor, her Russian-born parents “speak absolutely wonderful English, but they don’t pick up lyrics a lot, unless they see it written down.”

While Spektor’s parents might not realize what their daughter is singing about, they rarely miss a show. And while Spektor recalls very little of her childhood in Russia, she does remember countless family trips to the opera and ballet.

Spektor spent her formative years in the Bronx, living with her parents by day and playing East Village clubs by night. Several major labels attempted to court the burgeoning singer, to no avail.

“For a long time, I was like, (there’s that verb again) the establishment! I’ll do everything myself,” Spektor said. Until she realized she was spending more time standing in line at the post office to ship CDs than writing songs.

Indie tendencies aside, she does have one diva request. “When I go on tour, I make sure I get a keyboard in my hotel room. Otherwise I go insane,” she said.

Still, a keyboard does not a piano make. During a recent tour in Europe with the Kings of Leon, Spektor’s piano withdrawal was so severe, she turned to the guitar.

“The only time I got to play piano was 10 minutes before sound check. At that point, it had been months since I had time to sit down and really be with a piano. I couldn’t have one on the road because it’s too heavy and too bulky, it was just a mess. So I had like, complete withdrawal by the time I was in the middle of the tour.”

If Spektor had her way, she would spend her days playing and writing, not answering the phone or even leaving the house for days at a time. She’d also buy the cherry red Baldwin piano that was lent to her for the Bowery Ballroom show.

“I had nothing to play at home so I would go there and play. I fell in love that red piano,” Spektor said of the Baldwin store in Manhattan, where she would practice regularly and became a regular fixture. “It’s women-run and they’re totally cool. They gave me jellybeans and Oreo cookies and hot chocolate.”