Catching Up With Alina Simone

Alina Simone, musician and author of Just Go and Win, wants readers to know that her book of personal essays is supposed to be funny. “What’s with all the serious questions?” she asks as I interview her about the book, music and some other seemingly somber topics. This may surprise those only familiar with her songs. Almost all are wistful, raw and emotional.

“Her music is pretty dark and melancholic,” says her book’s editor, Eric Chinski. “But the book too, while incredibly comic…there’s a lot of sadness–a kind of tragic, Russian quality.”

“I turned struggles into humor,” says Simone. “I basically wrote an uplifting book about failing.”

The struggles are abundant in the book, which might never have been written if not for a chance communication between Simone and Chinski. After Chinski heard her songs on Pandora, he began browsing her MySpace page. When one day he saw that she was online, a randomly sent a message sparked a correspondence. Immediately he could tell that she was witty. He asked her to write up what she’d been telling him, stories about trying to make it in New York and adventures in Russia—and what started out as a random instant message turned into a book deal.

“It was clear right away she can really write. She’s not just a singer with funny stories,” said Chinski.

The Ukranian-born Simone has lived in South Slope for the past couple of years and although her upbringing in typical suburbia (“trees, space, air”) might be considered the classic immigrant story, when dealing with the former Soviet Union, some exceptions definitely apply.

The daughter of political refugees, Simone grew up thinking she would never be able to go back to Russia. She rejected her heritage, partially to blend in with a homogenous Cold War society hostile to the USSR, and partially because it was pointless to cling to the past. When the wall fell down, everything changed and she began exploring her heritage.

The book details Simone’s struggles as a musician, from failed gigs to encounters with asshole producers, to her record label suddenly losing all their money, to admitting that she cannot escape the catchiness of Britney Spears.

It describes a number of her weird obsessions. Such as the Skoptsy, a Russian sect also known as the Castrati for obvious reasons. She visted them in Canada and called their unexpected closeness “fucking fascinating.” It also details her enthrallment with Serbian singer Yanka Dyagileva, of whom she recorded a cover album, and her baptism at the hands of a Russian punk monk.

Although there is a common theme, Simone wanted each essay to stand on its own, which she definitely accomplishes, following a seemingly random arrangement and avoiding a more chronological order because, she says, “My life doesn’t make any sense. It’s not logical.”

At the end of it, Simone doesn’t take her success or failures too seriously, with a zen-like approach to any fears or hopes about how her book and latest album (which will coincide with the book’s release) will be received. “Either it’ll find its audience or it wont,” said Simone. “And that’s fine.”