Back in April of 2013, I came across a music video on YouTube for BETS‘ song “Rooftop Lover” and immediately fell in love with both the song and the video. The video captured something I had experienced so many times during hot Los Angeles summers… hanging out with friends on the rooftops of apartment buildings taking in the beauty of the city as the sun sets into multi-colored sky. With the singer-songwriter’s (Betsey Haley Hershey) new LP, Days Hours Nights, the ability to continuously paint stunning portraits of experiences through her songs and videos is what draws me into her music, her world. A perfect example of this is BETS’ video for the single “Jenny,” which is about a one night stand in Paris and takes the viewer on a voyeuristic journey into the brief love affair.

BETS style of storytelling is extremely filmic, leading me along in such a way that I am actively listening, interpreting, and wanting to know what happens next. In “Daydream,” my favorite song from Days Hours Nights, I imagine her and a bunch of friends in a late night game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, a variation of the game Spin the Bottle. When the bottle points to her, she ends up in spending 7 minutes of romantic time in a dark closet with someone she has a secret crush on. As the minutes tick down, she desperately wants time to stop. I don’t actually know whether my interpretation is accurate, but it doesn’t matter, because what I love is how her writing makes my mind want to join in the experience and creatively fill in any blanks if necessary.

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