Here’s a musician you should know: Emily Arin.

She just released a stellar new album called Patch of Land. This is her first studio album, and it’s getting some major attention. For instance, Barry Alfonso  (the guy who wrote liner notes for Johnny Cash, Captain Beefheart, and Peter, Paul & Mary) wrote the official iTunes review for the album, which she says was a fun surprise. One of the songs, “Hidden Flame” was featured in Greenland’s first international feature film, Nuummioq. The film was screened at Sundance, and Emily performed at last year’s film fest.

So now you know some of the fancy “official” reasons why you should like her. But the really cool thing about Emily is how she made her first album, Time and Space. It was a bedroom endeavor sold solely to subscribers—one song a month. At the time, she was working insurance and getting restless (who can blame her). She enrolled in the Musician's Institute in Los Angeles to become a better guitar player and songwriter. But the style they preached didn’t match her own “There was a ton of electric guitar noodling going on,” she says. So, as any creatively suppressed artist would do, she quit.

The next week she set up a simple website and committed herself to writing and recording a new song every month for a year. “I figured if enough people signed up, it could support me in some way financially,” she says. “About 70 people became paid subscribers—which did not pay the bills, but gave great encouragement and support.”

In the meantime, she worked odd jobs. After a year, she had enough cash to take flamenco lessons in Spain. So she booked a flight. Her trip would also take her to Sweden, Germany, and Poland, so she packed a few CDs of her home-recordings, just for fun. “Since I had 12 recorded songs, I decided to print them as an album to bring with me on my travels,” she says. “Any time I had a nice conversation with someone—at a train station, a hostel, a bar—I gave them a copy.” She gave her tunes to some pretty cool people. She met a guy who passed her album to Sergio Diaz of Os Mutantes, a band she loves. Diaz emailed her later, to thank her for the CD and to say that he enjoyed it, and they became friends. Emily still hears from people who have stumbled on that first homemade album. She recently received a note and an invitation to perform from a woman she met at a bus stop.

In a world where sharing music with people face-to-face seems to be a lost joy, Emily Arin makes music a community experience. “Without a doubt, music is a medium of connectivity,” she says. “Community emerges through shared experience, shared ritual, shared trials and triumphs, shared enjoyment.” She still carries a few copies of both albums in her purse, and says the CDs in her car mostly come from friends. “For me, music is always an experience of being in community,” she says, “And while it's fun to have face-to-face exchanges, another facet of the beauty is that we can listen anywhere.”

To learn more about Emily, visit emilyarin.com, and here her new album (and old album) on bandcamp.

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