Miss Mehta always looks on the bright side of life and in doing so, makes every day fair weathered.

 Mehta has always wanted to do something in her life that helped and inspired others. At first she thought the way to do that was through the academia. She went to Queen’s University and dreamt of earning a Master’s degree—until she sank into a depression during her last year of school here. 

Then she turned to music.

 “If I hadn’t of had the last year of school that I did, I’d probably be a professor,” she says. 

Once school was done, Mehta started a band and started thinking about what she wanted to when she grew up. Them, it struck her. 

“Once I realized it was actually possible to and OK to make music for a living, then I realized what I was doing was making sense.”

Mehta has performed extensively as a backup singer in the Winnipeg music scene and just released her first solo album called “Weather Vane”.

Some have criticized the disc—and Mehta—for being too dark, too gloomy and too depressing. But she says they’re just not appreciating the calm after the storm.

 “The story I tell at my concerts is: my five-year-old niece was talking to my mom and she said, “I listen to Nicky’s CD before I go to sleep and sometimes it makes me want to cry,’” Mehta says.

 “My mom said, “You shouldn’t tell Auntie Nicky that. It will make her sad.’ And my niece said, ‘No, no. It makes me cry in a happy way.’

 “What I ‘m trying to convey is that it’s not depressing to feel these things if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Take her tune Good Life. It tells the story of a couple who dream of buying a house they’ve always wanted down the lane. They dream of babies, family, and laughter. But later in life, they find themselves buying two houses on the same block to make the separation easier on the children. Sad? No. Optimistic.

At the end of the song, the woman sits at the window and watches the snow fall.

“We all think that if life goes as planned, life will be better. But things happen for a reason,” she says.

“We’d all be a lot happier if we took cues from our surroundings. You have to look at life like seasons. Snow comes and goes. So do life’s problems.”

Mehta’s album is a poetry book full of beautiful songs. If you read her lyrics, you’ll be lulled into a complicated world—but with Mehta’s child-like honesty and enthusiasm, it’s a world brimming with simple pleasures. 

Like backyard barbeques. Rain. Change.

And when Mehta sings her poetry, you know she’s one of those people who dances in the rain. She sings with hope, strength, and power.

Life’s too short not to. Mehta storms into the Bookstore Café in Camden East tomorrow night. .