Angie Arsenault’s fans put funding where their faith is on remarkable debut

Not many recording artists come out of the gate with a core group of fans, numbering in the several hundred, who believe so strongly in the artist’s work that they are willing to pony up the cost of the recording. Then again, not many artists are Angie Arsenault.

A transplanted Acadian breaking up and out of the Montreal scene via Prince Edward Island – where she wrote her first song on her grandma’s piano at the age of ten – the now fully-realized singer, pianist and songwriter is proving herself as adept at getting her message out to the masses as she has been at penning potently soulful, slow-burning pop-rock epics that at times recall a Tori Amos or Amy Lee in their intensity, or perhaps a Coldplay or Radiohead in their breadth.

Which is to say, in a remarkable feat of fealty, over 500 fans from around the globe put their money where their ears are on website Sellaband.com and raised enough cash to completely finance Angie’s full-length album debut, Once Upon a Dream. (Sellaband.com is an Amsterdam-based music label that uses crowd-sourcing to raise money for musicians – typically $50,000, at no cost to the artist – which is then used to produce and record an album.) Angie is the first, and so far the only, Canadian artist to have an album funded solely by Sellaband.com.

That she should be so successful in this venture is maybe not so surprising, quite apart from the considerable musical talent she brings to the table, given that this is not Angie’s first successful exploitation of Web 2.0 concepts and popular social media networks: her work has enjoyed more than 2,000 downloads, 80,000 MySpace listens and upwards of 200,000 YouTube views in the two short years since the release of her water-testing 2007 EP, The First Set.

All of which to say, Angie knows the difference between knowing how it works, and knowing how to work it. And it helps to be good at both.

In support of the just-released Once Upon a Dream (a semi-concept album – recorded in full band mode with piano, bass, drums and cello with additional strings and guitars – that explores internalized dream space as it relates to externalized expression, and produced by Montreal’s Daniel Cinelli), Angie is releasing the first album single, Turn Around, as well as launching a series of web video shorts that chronicle the making of Once Upon a Dream. Visit www.angiemusic.com for complete details, as well as for Twitter and Facebook information.