Would someone please convince Asheville native Roberta Flack to come back and play for us?

An Asheville performance is long overdue for native Roberta Flack. Now seems like the perfect time for a return visit. This Cleveland Plain Dealer story has the scoop:

Roberta Flack hasn’t put out a proper studio album in more than a decade. Her next one should be a doozy, however. “I’ve been trying to finish an album of Beatles songs,” the R&B chanteuse says, reached at home in New York City.

Then she asks: “You want to hear one?”

Before your reporter can pinch himself, Flack cues up a recording. Even over the phone, the effect is magical. Accompanying herself delicately on piano, she sings in a crystalline voice:

Here, making each day of the year

Changing my life with a wave of his hand

Nobody can deny there’s something there. . .

Clearly, at 69, Flack remains perfectly capable of killing you softly. (Assault with a deadly ballad, anyone?) She’ll headline a benefit concert Saturday night at John Hay High School, to raise money for the Cleveland School of the Arts.

Besides her jazz-tinged rendition of “Here, There and Everywhere,” Flack has versions of “In My Life,” “Here Comes the Sun” and “Come Together” in the can for her Beatles project, still a work-in-progress. No word yet on a release date.

“I did a serious reading of ‘Come Together,’ where I wrote a little thing at the end for kids to sing,” she says. “That music was very, very, very much in my head, in everybody’s life when I started singing. . . . I love the [Beatles’] music, all of it.”

For years, Flack has lived across the hall from Yoko Ono in Manhattan’s Dakota building, where John Lennon was murdered in 1980.

“Yoko and I have a very strong friendship,” Flack says. “We’re both Aquarians. I shared a lot of intimate moments with her and John, at their dinner table.”

All the same, Flack hasn’t played any of her Beatles songs for Ono just yet.

“She knows I’m doing this, but I’m not pushing anything,” Flack says.

The Asheville, N.C., native had a string of chart-topping singles in the 1970s, including the Grammy winners “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” (The latter tune later got a hip-hop makeover courtesy of the Fugees.) Flack also scored hits with duet partner Donny Hathaway (who died in 1979), including “Where Is the Love” and “The Closer I Get to You.”