Bethi

I'm feeling in an exceedingly Christmassy mood today - I think it's something to do with the sudden drop in temperature - half of England is snowed in, and it's about 1^o celsius here! I've been singing Let it Snow all day - much to the disgust of my housemates! I'm really just a little kid at heart when it comes to Christmas - I love shopping for presents, and cosy nights in with hot choc and marshmallows, and ice skating when the rink comes in November. It drives my husband nuts, as he hates shopping, and always injures himself ice skating! So where my housemates are preparing for Hallowe'en (which I don't celebrate) and Guy Fawkes' Night (which I celebrate with great enthusiasm!), I'm already planning what to buy people for Christmas and playing the Pogues. I have, in fact, already bought presents for my sister-in-law and nan-in-law, and plan to do a bit more present-buying at the weekend, when my wonderful hubby takes me shopping (he doesn't know this yet!!), as well as stocking up on warm jumpers. In retrospect, it is probably as well that I started buying Christmas presents over the summer holidays, as my student loan STILL hasn't come through, and I'm now starting to feel the pinch, having not had any money for over a month, and having well overspent what meagre savings I had left over from my loan last year. Even so, the thought of Christmas still fills me with great anticipation of wonderful things that aren't necessarily expensive - walks in the frosty park with my hubby, playing Nap with my in-laws (My husband and I save our coppers all year for that particular event - and always go home in disgrace with slightly fuller pockets than we went with!) and listening to cheesy Christmas pop with my friends and housemates. In general, life is good. Bethi

Firstly, I must apologise for the delay between the last post and this one. I'd like to say it's because I've been busy recording wonderful new material to put up here, but it's not. I have, however written a new song - not a 'life' song, as many of the songs here are - I mean those written about a specific time in my life, inspired by specific people in my life; but a song of praise and worship for God, and an acknowledgement of how feeble I am compared to Him. Not sure how outspoken I'm allowed to be on here, although I know that the site is American, and American laws on religious music are much less restricting that those here in the UK; but all the same, I don't really want to get kicked off! So, what to say. There is little news other than the new song - which hopefully has a recording imminant, although I am having one of my wonderful friends look over it before I know whether it will be good enough to go live. Big news though - if I do record it, I may not be a solo artist on this project. My housemate wants to get involved in singing it with me (which may lead to all sorts of wonderful things, like harmonies!) and I hope to be able to pull together a band - or at least a guitar backing, with some sort of drum effect from my keyboard. Beyond that. I apologise for the lack of picture - and for the fact that I am unlikely to rectify this state of affairs any time soon. Unfortunately, I am writing this on a computer at uni, and my digicam is at home, which rather limits my picture capacity. Added to this, I will shortly be going fencing, and I don't do flushed, sweaty, just-come-off-the-piste photos - I might be sociopathic (as my wonderful best friend is so fond of telling me - you know who you are!!), but I still retain some vanity - at least when it comes to posting photos of myself on the world wide web. Well, that's all for now, gotta go bash the Soton team!! Bethi

I suppose one of the logical questions to answer here, is why choose Bethi as an artist name? It's not my name, or a nickname, and certainly not a shortening of my name - my parents did not believe in abbrieviating their children's names - in fact, being 'proper Welsh', they ran my first and second names together to make one really long name! So why did I pick it? In actual fact, it's a testimony to my bookworm childhood. In The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynn Jones, one of the people Christopher meets is a goddess in world 11 (to understand more, go read the book), and, in return for him bring her books to read, she offers him a cat - "but not Bethi, she's my favourite". From the first time I read that book, I wanted to be called Bethi, so that was the name I picked as my artist name even before I discovered ubw. So there you have it. I named myself after a small white cat. Bethi

Ok, well here goes. My first blog. Not really sure what to say... Hi, thank you for coming to my page and looking at what I do. ? Well, I haven't recorded any new music recently - that's not to say that I haven't been writing, I just haven't recorded it. I've only recorded 10 songs (well 11 now, coz I've just finished recording one I wrote for a friend last summer), and I've written over 20. Yeah, not a lot, I know, but I only got serious about songwriting in my final year of college (that would be 6th form in high school if you're American), and I have to fit it in around full time uni and stuff. And I'm a medical student - not like an English student, who has maybe 5 lectures a week (yes, I know you have to do reading, too); I easily have 20 hours a week, and I can very often have more - up to 32! So there. Plus, I have exams and coursework and homework and stuff. Ok, so, what should I put in my blog? Not what I did today - that would suck. I had 2 Neuroscience lectures and I spent that rest of the day working on anatomy. Fun, huh? But my lovely housemate took me out to lunch which was cool. Well, maybe stuff related to this site? I looked at my stats today. First time I knew that that kinda stuff was recorded. I noticed that 22 people had been on my 'contact' page. Thank you all, you lovely people!! Erm, but could one of you tell me how I view it? Coz I get a 404 whenever I try http://www.unsignedbandweb.com/music/bands/11900/contact.php So I don't even know how to contact me (and what's more, I don't how to tell if one of you lovely people have contacted me). I see that I have listeners all over the world. I'm really sorry that I can't translate this into all of your native languages, but my german and french are just about conversational and my welsh and pidgin are abysmal. Perhaps nice kind bilingual people could do it for me? Otherwise, altavista does most common languages. Not that telling you this will help because if you can't understand what I'm saying, you won't understand me telling you how to translate this. O-K. Well, I have more material recorded than is on this site (as you should have gathered as, I've already said that I've recorded 11 songs, and only 6 are posted. This is because I am broke (like, really broke. I'm still waiting for my student loan to come through 4 weeks into term!) and cannot afford full membership of this site, and so I have the free package. Which gives me a limit of 6 songs and 15 Mb. Which I've already exceeded. If you're really really unbelievably interested in hearing more, first write in my guestbook, or something to tell me how I can see if you contact me. Then contact me. Or else just say that you are in my guestbook, and leave some way of getting a copy to you. Preferably electronically. I really have no money to be mailing CDs to South Korea. But then you may not want the whole world to see your contact dets. In which case, go with method 1. But please talk to me! I wanna know all about you! Ok, that was kinda stalker-ish. But I mean, what kind of person enjoys the music I write? Do you have any constructive criticism? You guys are gonna know all about me (in particular that I talk a LOT), by the end of this post, but I have no idea who's reading it, or what they think. That's what the guestbook's for! I'm not gonna know who you are, so it's not like I'm gonna hunt you down if you say I'm awful (not that I would even if I did know who you are. Honest). So let me know! Bethi