She's got long, dark hair and dark eyes, and if her photographs are any indication, she favours dark clothing.

She plays guitar and says without apology or equivocation, that her musical milieu is folk and - uh-oh - she says she takes on serious subject matter in her songs. But if all this creates a mental picture of some early Janis Ian-style musical depressive, you don't know Nick.

So, consider the concert tonight at the Gas Station Theatre as an introduction to Nicky Mehta, who is launching her first solo CD release Weather Vane. Of course, for anyone familiar with the local folk scene, no introduction is necessary. Mehta has frequently been seen singing back-up for the likes of folk-friendly types such as Sam Baardman, Mark Reeves, The Wyrd Sisters and Rick Unruh.

"I've been playing around town for the past four years but it's been the back-up stuff that started getting me a little more attention," she says. "And then the people I was singing with were encouraging me to do my own stuff more and more."

Weather Vane is a decisive step from the background to the foreground. And it's s step Mehta makes with a decidedly upbeat sound, with the help of musical collaborators such as drummer Daniel Roy, accordionist Christine Fellows and keyboardist Lloyd Peterson, who will be joining her at the Gas Station tonight.

"People who are used to my acoustic show are going to probably be surprised that some of the music is quite up and rhythmic as opposed to that lone acoustic guitar thing," she says. That brings up the depressing folk singer image, with which Mehta is quite familiar.

"I get accused of that often, of the morose, maudlin songwriting, which I'm always arguing against", she says. "People assume that if you have a certain subject matter, you're writing about depressing things."

"I'm writing about difficult circumstances and tragedies sometimes," she says, but asserts that confronting hardship is "the road to happiness and the road to hope."

"So, the songs to me are very joyful because those explorations are a part of life. It's in avoiding them where the real depression lies."

So, I think the band aspect takes advantage of the joyful stuff beneath it", she says. "And that's where I was really lucky, because I work with people who are not only amazing musicians, but are really respectful of the music and reality into understanding what was going on with it." Tickets to Mehta's CD release concert are $5.