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  Alina Simone

I'll just come out and say it: my MOG posts got me a book deal from a major publisher. I am not claiming I deserve it and I certainly wasn't expecting it. It is, in fact, more than a little embarrassing that years of hard work in the indie rock trenches haven't even earned me as much money as my (small) book advance, nor the kind of stability that a well-established publisher can offer.It started

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It was the fall of 2004 when I became the singer for another guy's band. The echo of my sameness reverberating in my head was driving me crazy and I was sick of my solo self. Making music by yourself is...lonely.So I started singing for the Brooklyn band, Emma La Reina. We practiced in this hulking warehouse on the lip of the East River and at night the Brooklyn Bridge glittered in our industrial-

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I broke up my band. It was too hard to continue being myself - a "nice" girl from the suburbs of Massachusetts -and to keep asserting myself with all these indie guy musicians, with their effortless self-confidence and encyclopedic knowledge of all-things-Pitchfork. I crawled into my little cardboard box, filled it with Alan Lomax recordings, and started booking my way through the million lonely b

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My band got a rehearsal space in Williamsburg. Or rather, we moved into our drummer's space. Do you remember the mid nineties, when lots of young people who understood more about computers than you did, got rich doing something nebulous for a Dot Com? Our drummer was one of those people. He had quit that job by the time he met up with us and was mainly doing yoga and wandering around the city taki

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The first time I kicked someone out of my band, I felt like ass. Many unfamous people have already noted that being in a band is like being in a relationship, and that leaving (or asking someone to leave) is like breaking up. Yes, only sometimes it can actually... well...it can actually be worse than that!There is the deep, spiritual aspect (I just don't want to be your friend badly enough to risk

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For some number of months, I had been diligently plugging away at my blog, which illuminates the story of one indie-rock girl's slow and painful (but not completely un-funny) music industry education.Then in the fall of 2007 a number of things happened:1. I was offered a label deal and it was pretty fabulous...2. On the eve of my debut album's going into production (and two hours before I was goi

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So the success of my childhood friends taught me that nothing was impossible. Becoming a singer was a matter of wanting it badly enough. Spending my days doing other things was a matter of just deciding other life priorities matter more to me. It sounds so simple, but it was very hard to digest this idea because I had always figured that someone else was going to come along and save me...But there

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Let's ignore the present for now. The fact that I've been living in Brooklyn for over a week now and still don't know my roommate's last name. And that a new girl arrived yesterday to build a bed-sized-space in the middle of our small living room as part of said roommate's quest to split the rent molecules into their essential elements.Back to Ms. Fancy and the how she became famous. For a year Ms

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I want to jump forward into the future for a sec, because two weeks ago I impulsively left North Carolina and moved back up to New York City. Basically, I ran away from home. How can I put an indie-rock spin on what is, essentially, a tale of homelessness? I can't, so I'll just describe what happened instead, in the rawest of terms. If you ever befriend an addict, they will tell you that the fi...

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