I wrote a song recently, for a project I was working on with some other Soundclick artists (Ron Gragg, ohgrant, JC Carroll, and Mississippi Spud.) I wrote it as a testimony on how love evolves over the course of a lifetime, and yet how it always stays the same. As often is the case, I've kind of wrote it through my own eyes... from the vantage point of how we have become grandparents, and learning that a much loved niece and nephew are getting married next year. And now, it turns out that this is the first song I've ever done for which there is a video! Not by my doing, but by Country Rose of the Country Rose Show. When I saw the video she made of this song, I am not ashamed to admit I cried like a baby. Check it out! It's called 'Richard Bethell - Enchantez' about the video: A gift for Richard featuring his lovely song 'Enchantez'... a beautiful heartfelt song!

A lot of my songs are actually my way of practising the meditation technique of St. Ignatius Loyola. This song, my latest, is that kind of meditation: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/songInfo.cfm?bandID=327734&songID=5447078 Not to go into detail about what Ignatian meditation is, but the gist of it is that you put yourself into scenes of the Bible, and soak in the impression that the scene makes on you. In "Rivers of Tears", I transfered my own sorrow about the things I've done wrong in my life into the places and scenes of repentance in the New Testament - the woman washing Jesus' feet with her tears; the Prodigal Son returning home, resolved to ask his father if he can be a slave in his household; and the woman caught in adultery of whom Jesus said, "Woman, where are your accusers? Neither do I condemn you." Music is kind of an intense form of meditation if you immerse yourself in it, and to practice Ignatius's meditation in this way is quite powerful. Placing yourself in the Bible is perhaps the most authentic way to understand it.

A vintner is someone who knows exactly when to harvest the grapes, a brief window between a time when the grapes are too sweet and the time when there is frost. They know exactly when to put the crushed juice into barrels, and how long to keep the barrels in storage, where the juice ages into wine. And if they open the barrel, and taste what they have produced, the expert vintner knows exactly when to bottle it, and he also knows if it has turned to vinegar. So what do you do with the vinegar, then? This is the question. At the moment, I have no answer.

Nobody stands up for Neanderthals. Any time someone is derided as backwards, they are called a "Neanderthal." Linguists and anthropologists are unwilling to believe they had language even though there is plain anatomical evidence that they did. There are the remarkable things they did, too. 70,000 years ago, in the Harz mountains, a Neanderthal tribe created glue from Birch pitch - to do this, they had to heat Birch sap anaerobically to a precise temperature - something precise and technical enough they could not conceivably do this without language to pass the procedure on from generation to generation. That said, the Neanderthals were not us. They died out, and we didn't. So why? One difference is that modern humans appear to carry around materials from far away places, far outside their range. There is evidence that our kind travelled great differences, and traded with other tribes. The fossil record does not show that for Neanderthals. Their tools are always made from local materials. Furthermore, while we are built slight for long distance walking, Neanderthals are stocky and strong - built for exertion but not endurance travel. So I propose this - our kind developed a sense of collective nationhood or peoplehood: we thought of distant kin as part of our extended family. We were built to travel and see them, and our abstract way of thinking helped us represent ourselves to distant people in a favourable light (one need only need the representations the Maccabees made to the Romans in the Maccabee books of the Apocrypha to see an example.) This sense of nationhood allowed us to pool the knowledge of our small groups into larger national groups, transforming culture ever more rapidly. Since Neanderthal culture was always incubated in groups of 12-18 people, the critical mass needed to move beyond Mousterian culture never came. Our ability to identify beyond our family and locale - perhaps it is this that makes us Homo Sapiens.

I am involved in a lot of blues activity these days. There's a new collab coming out over at /BluesForumCollabs, and I've added a new song in that vein myself, Slowdown Blues. This was always my home genre - what I really started out playing. The band I was in for two decades started out as a horn based blues band, and morphed in a progressive fusion band over time. But the blues is what I always loved. Once it has your soul, it always has your soul.