Behind the Music Scene – March 2026

THE STORY is familiar: an up-and-coming singer and songwriter wins a regional songwriting award, earns some studio time and is poised on the brink of success. But then life gets in the way—school, marriage and eventually kids. You blink and the opportunity passes and becomes a story from your past, maybe one that nags at you always, sometimes or almost never.

For Jacksonville musician and attorney Alissa Weaver, it’s almost never. Sometimes she thinks of what might have been but most of the time she’s too busy—practicing law, pouring wine at the Jacksonville Wine Lounge and playing local shows with her band, now called “Pacifica.” Whatever the role, though, the music is always there.

It’s been that way since the start.

“My parents were into music,” she says. “We always had guitars and pianos and things in the house. And I just really loved to sing.”

So, sing she did, but mostly to herself. It wasn’t until she was living in Sausalito in the early 90s, after “loafing” through college, living for a time in Washington, D.C., selling sunglasses in Laguna Beach and “following the Grateful Dead around for a few years” that she actually went public. “It was my new year’s resolution,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘I can’t just sit her singing to myself.’” She joined a band, played a few shows and then a new direction arrived, in the form of a heart-to-heart from her father, a heart surgeon.

“He told me it was time to go back to school.” She took the GRE and the LSAT, scored better on the LSAT and was off to law school at Willamette. There she began playing with the cousin of a friend, garnering enough notoriety to win the Portland Songwriters’ Association award, along with some free studio time that she remembers fondly.

“It was so much fun,” she says now. “We recorded five or six songs, made our own CD…”

But then life came calling. Weaver moved south with her new husband and realized that she “wasn’t ready” to go solo. “I couldn’t play (alone),” she recalls, “because I couldn’t play an instrument well.” Instead, she set up her life in the Rogue Valley, raising two artistic children and operating her law office in Jacksonville, music woven through her life but always in the background, until someone contacted her about joining an 80s cover band in need of a singer.

“I was pushing my 12-year-old daughter (at the time) to go to open mics,” she recalls, “and then one day I realized: she doesn’t want to do this, I want to do this. I’d better just get back out there and do it myself.”

Since then, she’s become a fixture on the local music scene, diligently writing songs and filling the local wineries with a rotating group of band members and sometimes, on special nights, her now-28-year-old daughter Ruby.

Her shows are interactive affairs. The music is a blend of upbeat covers and originals, and Weaver calls out friends in the audience, sometimes interrupting herself mid-song to hug someone she hasn’t seen in a while. That she is having a great time is obvious—and contagious. “I’m an entertainer,” she says. “Some of us were just born with what I call the ‘hambone.’”

And about that award she left behind in Salem? “When I was 25,” she says, “I was probably a better singer, but I didn’t have the confidence. Now I’m old and I have all the confidence in the world. I think I’ve found a nice fit.”