When pianist/pop singer Alison Sudol feels low, she thinks of the fans who have told her they found peace in her dreamy music, which she performs under the name A Fine Frenzy [ tickets ].

"I come out [after shows] and meet people," said Sudol, who released the album "One Cell in the Sea" last July. "It's amazing how many stories there are. It's incredible. People's lives have been changed in various ways by listening to the CD, or they've been in very difficult situations and had nothing else to soothe them but that. Whenever I have a bad day or [I'm] feeling like, 'Oh my God. Is anybody even listening? Is this doing anything?' I think of the stories and it makes me not really question it."

Calling LiveDaily from Detroit, where she was scheduled to play The Shelter, Sudol explained that the album in which so many fans have found solace is more or less a concept album whose title is taken from the track "The Minnow and the Trout."

"To take 14 fairly different songs and kind of string them together with one concept was kind of daunting at first," Sudol said. "The whole song 'The Minnow and the Trout' is about unity. I think everyone--no matter where you're from, no matter how old you are, no matter what kind of person you are--is united by basic feelings. I think a lot of people have experienced the things on this album. Even though we might all be different, we're all connected in that way."

"One Cell in the Sea," which peaked at No. 91 on The Billboard 200 chart, was four years in the making. Sudol wrote the first two songs--the hit "Almost Lover" and "Near to You"--when she was 19. However, it took her awhile between writing those songs and "Come On, Come Out," which was the first song in the next batch of tunes she wrote a year and a half later.

"I knew what I wanted to do creatively, as far as the style of my music, but it took me awhile to actually execute it," she said. "It was rough because the music that I wanted to do was a delicate balance. It wasn't like anything else.

"A lot of people told me I was silly and I should be a pop star, or try out for 'American Idol,' all the routes that were especially popular back then. I said, 'No way. I want to write and create a world.' It took awhile and it took a lot of writing and trying things out. When I wrote 'Come On, Come Out,' we recorded it and I was like, 'OK. That's it.'"