Alina Simone – “Half My Kingdom”. A Brooklyn singer born in the Ukraine, singing a song by the Russian folk-punk Yanka Dyagileva – the title translated but the rest still Russian. But this is not as impenetrable as it sounds. Simone finds the song’s heart and with absolute single-mindedness, she sings it. It doesn’t matter that we don’t understand the words, that we never knew Dyagileva before she died – of apparent suicide – at age 24. There’s no mistaking the single, bright trumpet amid a mud of guitars, or Simone’s hard strum against the fade of her voice. This is a song about sacrifice, yearning, and what’s already spent. It’s a song about hope, and about the currents that carried Dyagileva away.