Honolulu Weekly

Sabrina Velazquez / Sabrina Velazquez is a do-it-yourself singer-songwriter based in Honolulu. She doesn’t have an agent, a manager or a record label, and she records on a shoestring budget. Other than her folksy guitar playing and sultry vocals, a demo she recorded last year featured Velazquez and her producer “stomping on cardboard and using spoons and change in our pockets, really anything we could get our hands on.” When The Anomaly, a six-song EP, was released this March, Velazquez didn’t pop champagne or throw a release party. Instead, she sent out a tweet.

“I put a little mention on Twitter, with a link to iTunes,” said Velazquez in a phone interview from New York City. Within minutes she received feedback from fans, some located as far as Europe and Australia, who had become enamored with her soothing blend of country-tinged, alternative-rock.

It was also through Twitter that Velazquez discovered [Kickstarter.com], a Brooklyn-based start-up that gives artists a chance to fund projects through monetary “pledges” from fans. Since its inception in April, Kickstarter has successfully funded projects like “Tiny Fabric Houses Want to Take Over the World!” (which raised $691, surpassing a goal of $250), a line of tiny, hand-sewn felt houses for stashing paperclips and safety pins, as well as “Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis,” (which raised $8,648, well beyond its $2,000 goal), a reinterpretation of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue via “chiptunes,” or Nintendo-like sound effects.

Velazquez’s project, “The LP Project: Sabrina Makes An Album,” has raised (at the time of this writing) $1,170 toward its $5,000 goal. She has until 10:46pm on Monday, November 30 to raise the rest. Incentives and mementos, all created by Velazquez to bring her closer to her fans, are featured on her Kickstarter page. Five dollars will get you exclusive updates and videos of the recording process. “Connecting one-on-one is really important to me,” she said. Pledge $1,000 and Velazquez will write a song on a topic of your choice, record it, and send it to you via email or snail mail.

“I really want someone to pledge $500 so I can commission an artist to draw their name on my guitar!” she exclaimed. “How cool would that be?”

If she succeeds, Velazquez will use the $5,000 to record her first full-length album–which she envisions having “a kind of upbeat, Tom Waits-y sound.” If she receives anything short of $5,000, she’ll get nothing (and pledgers, who submit their credit card information via Amazon accounts, won’t get charged).

In a way, Velazquez, who graduated from Kalani High School before attending the University of Southern California, is already a winner. Or at least that’s how she feels. “Just the fact that I’ve even gone over $1,000–I’m stoked!” she said. When she pitched her project to Kickstarter– the founders of the company handpick projects that stand out as particularly inventive or unique–she was the 640th project waiting to be considered.

What set Velazquez apart, besides raw talent and an unrelenting drive, were her island ties.

“I just told them, because, living in Hawaii, we’re so physically remote, we have to rely on our recorded music a lot more than other artists, because we can’t just pack up our van and travel and go on tour,” she said. “So I really, really wanted to record a full-length album…I want to reach audiences beyond Oahu.”

The interface of the Web has provided the perfect platform for someone like Velazquez, who lacks the sort of self-promotional braggadocio most artists use as a crutch. Instead, she’s the type of singer-songwriter who’d rather let her music do the talking. Although she maintains a blog ([listentosabrina.com]), a Myspace page and a Twitter account, she admits that she’s never caught onto the YouTube craze.

“I tried it once and it seemed really odd,” she said. “That’s one thing I have to do more of though, is take videos of myself. It always just feels so awkward!”

At first, Velazquez even had qualms about starting her Kickstarter account.

“I was so nervous, I thought, ‘Oh my god. I can’t believe I did that! I’m going out there and asking people for money!’” she said.

“But then I thought, ‘OK,’ I really wanted people to be apart of the process and this is one way to do it. I want to see where my music can go.”