In five short years Emilia Dahlin has gone from playing for spare change on the streets of San Francisco to being one of the best up-and-coming singer-songwriters playing in the Portland area.

Dahlin, a 27-year-old Massachusetts native, studied art history and photography at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass. She came to Portland to study documentary photography at the Salt Institute after stints in San Francisco and the Boston area, but by then had already fallen in love with playing music.

A self-taught guitarist, she had a somewhat different background from other singer-songwriters.

“I grew up playing classical piano, actually,” Dahlin said Wednesday. “I didn’t pick up the guitar until college, and I was a lot more of a singer at that point. But it was my move to Maine that coincided with music being my main interest.”

Dahlin’s big, expressive voice points to one of her major influences. “I really love Ella Fitzgerald,” Dahlin said. “Vocally she’s a huge inspiration.”

While Dahlin shares a musical genre with similarly minded musicians such as the Indigo Girls and Joni Mitchell, her lyrics shy away from the blatantly confessional or from finger-pointing anger. She seems less concerned with hammering home some sort of message or her personal emotional experience than with simply observing the world around her.

Dahlin checks two musicians she has played with recently, Mason Jennings and Andrew Bird, as personal favorites. A casual listener will notice similarities in her percussive guitar style and jazz-inflected vocals to Ani DiFranco, but Dahlin says that’s only a small part of the bigger picture.

“I don’t really listen to Ani anymore,” she said. “I’m going to start recording my new album next month, and it’s going to be a lot more rootsy, with some more jazz influences.”

Dahlin has two albums out; her first, “Stealing Glimpses,” was released in 2002. Her most recent self-titled album has garnered airplay on Orono’s WMEB and Portland’s WFNX radio stations.

Dahlin says she still considers herself a visual artist in addition to a musician.

“At different points my passions have been art and photography and music, or all three,” she said. “But I definitely believe you do what you love, and right now music is my big thing.”

Emilia Dahlin will play a solo set at 6:30 tonight at Soma 36 in Orono, and will play again at 1:45 p.m. Saturday at the University of Maine’s Bumstock music festival with a drummer and bassist. Bumstock is free for students and $10 for nonstudents, and features more than 20 local and regional bands, artists and DJs, playing from 1 p.m. until midnight. For more information on Emilia Dahlin, visit her Web site at www.emiliadahlin.com. Emily Burnham can be reached at eburnham@bangordailynews.net.