Alina was born in the Ukraine but was raised in the suburbs of Massachusetts, where she often saw Mary Lou Lord singing in T stations (“she was my idol”). The post-high school road led Alina to potent places like Texas and New York City; she began her musical career busking on the streets of Austin and performed with Emma la Reina, a rock band in New York. Alina has one critically-acclaimed EP (Prettier in the Dark) under her belt and a new full-length due out in 2007, with a range of songs featuring full band arrangements, strings, and odd found instruments (like Alina’s beloved ‘strum stick’). The New Yorker has called her voice “potent and ethereal,” and Venus characterized her songwriting as “mysterious, gritty and raw.” Her music is for lovers of Cat Power, PJ Harvey, and Sinead O’Connor. In her travels around the United States and the rest of the world, Alina has opened for Bettie Serveert, Takka Takka, Alec Ounsworthy (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), Orienda Fink, Scout Nibblett, Jason Anderson, Eugene Mirman, Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett of Arcade Fire), Jason Collett (of Broken Social Scene) and the Wedding Present. In 2006 she also performed at a music festival in Moscow. On April 15 2008 her latest album Everyone Is Crying Out to Me Beware was released. Atribute to the Russian poet Yanka Dyagileva and sung in Russian. Listen at Last.fm
I was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine and grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts. I never sang in public until I moved to Austin, Texas where I started playing in the doorway of an abandoned bar near the corner of 6th and Congress. My music is about people that bring you to the brink of joy and despair and about having epiphanies in the most ordinary places. -—— THE NEW YORKER: Alina Simone, a Ukrainian-born singer with a potent and ethereal voice, writes wistful songs laced with spare guitar playing that have a Cat Power-like quality. MAGNET: The six songs on this beautiful debut obsess over capturing minute physical details. sulfur lights glare down on a romance as it unfolds in a parked car ("Louisiana Song"), and white church spires pierce the sky behind the local pawnshop where lovers converge ("Cash America Pawn"). The instrumentation — spare guitar and cello with minimal drums — leaves Simone's aching Rebecca Gates-meets-Chan Marshall voice exposed and vulnerable. PITCHFORK: Simone rejects the generically folksy strum that keeps many talented singers stuck on the coffee-shop circuit, choosing instead to wrap her smoldering voice around dark, fractured arrangements that tremble on the verge of vanishing entirely