Marina V at Falls Church Episcopal Church

The lovely Russian singer was born Marina Gennadievna Verenikina, but she goes by the simpler name of Marina V.

Born in Moscow, she first visited the United States as a 15-year-old student and now, with dual Russian-U.S. citizenship, lives in the Los Angeles area.

She's visiting Falls Church to perform in a benefit concert for the Falls Church Community Service Council. The show will be followed by a reception in her honor.

Describing her sound in news materials, Marina writes, "If the Beatles and Tori Amos had a child raised in Russia by Tchaikovsky, that would be me. My music is melodic and passionate, it comes from my heart and from everything I've experienced in my life."

For someone barely in her 20s, she has experienced a lot. Marina's dad was a communist nuclear physicist. Her mom, a child psychologist, noticed that Marina was making up melodies before she began talking. So, for eight years, her parents sent Marina to a music school each day after her regular classes.

The rigid atmosphere was not exactly complementary to the child's pop-leaning interests. After Marina offered a self-penned song to a teacher who dismissed it as "nonsense," she put songwriting on hold and turned to more typical childhood pursuits such as reading, skateboarding, swimming and ice skating. When Marina discovered the Beatles, her muse returned.

She taught herself English by studying their lyrics, spent days hunting down Beatles tapes and resumed her songwriting, mixing the bright, pop sounds with her training in Russian classical and folk traditions. Winning a national competition for a scholarship to study in the United States at age 15, she lived here for a year and vowed to return.

Back home, Marina found a job as a secretary while helping to support her family and finishing high school. By 17, she had retunred to the United States, living in Illinois and writing songs as her outlet for dealing with loneliness and the adjustments to her new life.

Meeting collaborator Nick Baker (co-writer, guitarist, drummer) was the next step. He inspired her to see music as a career. So she sold her pickup to buy a piano. Her original song "Leaving" won her first prize at a college talent competition, and she was able to finance recording sessions for a debut CD, "Let Me Dream," from the pre-orders of students and faculty.

After exhausting the exposure opportunities of the local music circuit in Illinois and surrounding states, Marina and Baker relocated to Los Angeles. She played small gigs while sending out demos to any and all music industry contacts she could find.

Working with a well-connected manager from New York, Marina released a CD in 2005, "Simple Magic." Jack Douglas, an industry veteran whose credits include John Lennon, George Harrison and Aerosmith, produced two of its songs. An in-studio concert album, "Live at SoundMoves," followed a year later.

Early last year, Marina released "Modern Fairytale," recorded with her band, Baker and engineer Jared Brown at the home studio of Graham Nash. The album mixes images based in modern reality -- love, loss, war -- with those drawn from a land of dreams and fairy tales -- ghosts, butterflies, guardian angels.