Tonight! Allison Weiss, Beth Bombara and the Northwoods at the Firebird

By Annie Zaleski Tue., Dec. 22 2009 at 8:43 AM

Tonight at the Firebird, get your folk on with a fine triple bill. Locals Beth Bombara and the Northwoods and Athens, Georgia, singer-songwriter Allison Weiss. In the paper this week, I described Weiss like this:

In recent years, Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis has preferred to be country's sweetheart instead of an indie-rock goddess. Thankfully, Athens, Georgia's Allison Weiss fills the latter's sweet-and-sour pop niche quite well, thanks to a twang-hiccupped vocal style and tough-girl tunes.

The college senior is rather resourceful. Bombara passed along an interesting New York Times article (scroll down to the third piece), which notes that Weiss used a website called Kickstarter to help finance her new CD. The premise is simple: Go to the website, and you'll find filmmakers, musicians and other creative types (Asobi Seksu is front-and-center now) asking fans to donate money to fund their artistic endeavors. In return, artists offer special-editions of the resulting product or other incentives, to encourage donations. Locals might be interested in checking this out for their own projects.