Alina Simone went in to the studio with a beloved musician on her mind. Nine months later, she had a fully grown album
By Katy Henriksen, Published: August 6th, 2008

Alina Simone’s searing covers album of Russian punk-poet Yanka Dyagileva’s songs, Everyone Is Crying Out To Me, Beware (CD via 54º 40? or Fight!, Vinyl via Topple Records), was a research project of sorts. “I wanted to do it ever since I heard her music. For years it was a plan, but it definitely wasn’t the thing I thought I was going to do right after my first album,” Simone says via phone from Milwaukee while on tour.

Simone’s ideas finally became a reality through serendipitous intervention. “I had a friend in Chapel Hill who was a painter. She was applying for this emerging-artists grant from the Durham Arts Council, and she asked me if I would apply with her. But I was like, ‘I play indie rock, no one gives grants for that.’” Eventually, Simone’s friend convinced her to fill out the one-page application. They both turned the proposals in, and both were granted the money.

“So I got this grant. It wasn’t a ton of money. I just asked for the recording costs. Basically they were like, ‘You have nine months, and here’s the money,’” she explains. “‘In nine months, send us a copy of the CD and good luck to you.’ All of a sudden, I just had to do it.”

Simone had first come across Dyagileva’s music years ago after encountering indie-rock street musicians performing in Russian at Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. She struck up a conversation with them, because she’d never heard that music sung in Russian. The musicians told Simone about the thriving Russian-rock community in New York City and invited her to a show at the now-defunct Elbow Room, where one of them gave her a cassette recording of Dyagileva. “It opened the floodgates and kind of grew into an obsession from there,” she says.

When asked about what drew her to Dyagileva’s music, Simone gushes. “It just has this barebones architecture. There’s nothing between you and her. There’s no artifice. It’s all music that goes directly to the heart, and it was just her, her guitar, and her voice,” Simone says. “I loved her voice, and I loved the melodies of her songs. I fell in love with it on a total musical level.”

Dyagileva left behind only 29 songs at the time of her suicide in 1991. Her recordings circulated mostly through the exchange of cassette tapes and are still widely unavailable. Simone hopes to change that with a release of reinterpreted covers. “This is the ultimate DIY-punk rock,” Simone says. “So when recording, I felt like the intensity and the live-ness [factor] was really important. [The songs] are punk. They’re very repetitive and aggressive. The strumming is very fast and hard. So the first thing I did was slow them down. That opens up a lot of space.”

Because her grant was small, Simone only had enough money to book a studio for two weeks. She laid down the vocals and her guitar in virtually one take, which explains the raw intimacy of Beware. A trusted ensemble of musicians laid down added instrumentals, including electric and 12-string guitar, percussion, Moog synthesizer, trumpet, and strings.

Her versions of Dyagileva’s songs linger and swell with a minimal, orchestral swoon dictated by Simone’s richly textured alto. The punk immediacy is still there, just embellished and lingering, allowing for ebbs and flows that carry an unfettered intensity throughout. Sung entirely in Russian, English-speaking listeners can hear Simone’s voice as a pure instrument, one that commands the harrowing melodies of Beware, as in the song “From Great Knowledge.” The melody is so entrancing here that it will linger for days after only one spin.

“I think it was good for me to break out of what I had been doing, because my music was in a certain niche. It was really liberating to go out into this totally untracked terrain,” Simone says of the experience. “This album just does not sound like any other thing. I’m not saying this is good or bad, but people cannot say this is a cross between Rainer Maria and Blonde Redhead, they just can’t. It’s just its own fucking thing.”

Tackling such a huge and seemingly esoteric project this early on in her career has excited Simone, who already has 80 percent of her next album completed. “Through doing this Yanka album and inhabiting her musical world for a year, I’m hoping that it really brought me to another level for this next album.”