by Spencer Griffith
On its face, the concept of an under-heralded indie singer-songwriter recording an album in Russian of songs by a little-known Soviet punk-folk hero and releasing it via a small indie label doesn’t seem quite like the American attention-getter. But the readymade story scored the Ukrainian-born, former Carrboro resident Alina Simone loads of positive press in 2008 from indie tastemakers Pitchfork and The Onion, as well as mainstream heavyweights NPR, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. It’s for good reason: There’s more to Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware than an easy story. Simone pays tribute to the tragic life of Yanka Dyagileva by preserving her haunting, emotional tone while fleshing out Dyagileva’s bare lyrics with moody instrumental embellishments. “I’ve tried to walk that line between maintaining her rawness and spontaneity and still creating lusher and more complicated arrangements,” Simone told the Indy last summer, before expressing disbelief that she was “on the way to Omaha to sing a bunch of Russian songs.”

On her return to Carrboro, Simone will perform a set drawn from Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware along with a set that will pull from her two prior English language releases and Make Your Own Danger, an upcoming full-length that she hopes to finish in February. She’s not stopping there: Simone, who signed a book deal with Faber and Faber last week, will release a series of essays in 2010 that she describes as a split between her Russian background (”my quirky family, Yanka Dyagileva and my weird adventures in Siberia seeking out her music”) and her “life in the indie-rock trenches here in the U.S.”