Somewhere I lost my heart.

Somewhere I lost my soul.

Somewhere I lost everything.

Everything that made me whole.

What singer-songwriter Carol Noonan lost over the past two years, she rediscovered in a dark and lonely place — a place where only the truest, most authentic pieces of her life mattered. In her music, Noonan found the solace and the strength she could grasp nowhere else.

The result is her CD, “Carol Noonan,” self-produced and self-promoted on the Internet. While Noonan’s music is a mix of traditional folk songs and ballads, her marketing methods are on the cutting edge of technology. In essence, she is her own record store, filling orders from her Brownfield home in western Maine.

In the early 1990s, Noonan, now 40, rose to regional prominence as a member of the band Knots and Crosses. The group sold 20,000 records independently and was considered to be a New England phenomenon. She won five Boston Music Award nominations, winning for Outstanding Female vocalist in 1993. She was signed as a soloist with Rounder Records, recording “Absolution,” “Noonan Building & Wrecking” and “The Only Witness” between 1995 and 1997.

Noonan left the music business dispirited and defeated, according to the biography posted on her Web site. While she was critically acclaimed, with each subsequent album, Rounder spent less and less time and money promoting her work. Noonan retreated to the home she shares with husband Jeffrey Flagg only to find herself plunged into a personal crisis that would challenge her emotionally and physically, and test her marriage and ultimately, her muse.

Flagg sewed fishing nets for commercial trawlers working out of Portland, but when many of his customers sold out in a government buyout, he lost 80 percent of his business, said Noonan. In a matter of months, Noonan’s husband went from being successfully self-employed with a crew of three to struggling to find any work at all.

Faced with the possibility of losing their home, Noonan turned her back on music and focused on saving the couple from financial ruin. For more than a year, she worked a full-time job at a flower shop and bartended at night, scraping enough money together “just to stave off disaster week by week,” her bio stated.

Noonan would come home from grueling 15-hour days and collapse in a chair at her kitchen table next to a stack of bills, knowing only that she had bought another day.

It was during one of these difficult days that she picked up her guitar and wrote “Lost Soul,” the most autobiographical song Noonan has ever written, she admitted. The songwriter that had been buried for more than a year was reborn, and music resurfaced as the defining purpose of her life.

In the fall of 1998, Noonan reconnected with longtime friend and producer Paul Bryan. She made weekly trips to his Cambridge, Mass., studio to record in his living room. Sometimes, that meant driving back in the middle of the night on snow-covered roads only to face another 15-hour workday. But Bryan, who worked on Noonan’s previous four albums, allowed the singer-songwriter to follow her creative instincts.

The result is an album that sounds like a primal wail that comes from the deep, dark recesses of Noonan’s creative soul. The Celtic influences that have peppered her other albums can still be heard, but the maturity, the perspective of the survivor permeates every note, every lyric, and even the silences between cuts.

Noonan follows “Lost Soul” up with “Just Because,” another story of loss. “She brushes her long hair in front of the mirror. She’s keeping count of the ones that turn grey. She looks at her hands and she sees her mother’s. She looks at her face and she turns away.”

According to Noonan, her greatest asset as a songwriter is as a storyteller. In song after song, that assertion is proved true in the recordings on the new CD. From “Wasted Years” to “Stronger Than Me” to “Leather Glove,” she tells stories of love forsaken, love lost and love that destroys. They tell of emotions so raw and pure they resonate in the marrow of listeners. The lyrics about domestic abuse are so powerful in “Leather Glove” that Noonan sometimes must tell fans the song is not about her husband.

Just as she insisted on artistic control, Noonan also insisted on financial control of her music. This CD is available now only through her Web site or by phone order. It is not in record stores and Noonan is not touring to promote it. However, she has done well enough to sell 800 copies since the CD was released in early December.

Noonan was lucky enough to have her album selected by Ned Wharton for his monthly segment “Director’s Cut” which airs on National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition” Saturday. After a cut from her album aired Dec. 5, Noonan sold 300 CDs. Orders continue to come in, the majority of them from the West Coast, a part of the country Noonan said is unfamiliar with her previous work.

Things are going well enough that she has quit her bartending job so she can spend her nights filling orders, answering e-mails, and promoting her work. Over the past six months, the fishing industry has stabilized and business has picked up again for her husband. Yet, Noonan is well aware that she is slipping through a breach in the recording industry that may be closed in a few years.

“The industry is really struggling right now,” she observed. “Someday it will find a way to keep this from happening. I can market this CD in a million different ways for two years. No record company can or would do that. I couldn’t have done this without the Internet.”

Carol Noonan’s CD is available through her Web site, www.carolnoonanmusic.com or by calling 1-877-GET-MYCD. The CD sells for $17.25, which includes the handling and shipping fees and sales tax.