Young Musician Creates Original Music Video

Betsey Giammattei pushes down the keys on a piano in a back room of her Temple Terrace home.

She begins to sing, a sweet melody escaping her lips. The song builds as the 18-year-old communicates a desire to see someone far away—someone she’d like to start a life with now, even though she can’t.

It’s a song about longing and dreaming, and it’s special not only because Betsey can relate to it, but because she actually wrote it.

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“Papercut Houses & Trees” is one of many songs that the 2012 graduate has written in the last 10 years. In July, she and her friend, Taylor Martin, 18, created a music video for the song and posted it on Betsey’s YouTube channel. It has more than 1,450 views.

Betsey said she’s been connected to music for as long as she can remember.

“She came out of the womb singing and dancing,” said her mother, Beth Bosserman Curts, who herself sings with , an a cappella chorus whose 120 members come from all over the Tampa area.

“Music is what our family does,” she added, explaining that Betsey’s two brothers are also musical and one of them, 23-year-old Kurt Giammattei, has a band in Pittsburg called The Whiskey Holler.

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Betsey began piano lessons at age 5 and continued taking them on and off until she was 11. She picked up guitar around age 13.

She said she remembers writing silly songs when she was 7 or 8—she wrote a lot of songs about cats—and then started writing more serious songs when she got to high school. At 14, she wrote one of her first serious songs, “One,” during the 2008 presidential election. It explored the idea that she and other teens were affected by political decisions even though they were too young to vote.

“That was her first foray into ‘I need my voice heard,’” Bosserman Curts said.

In 11th-grade, Betsey drew on the emotions she felt in her first relationship to write her songs. In November 2011, she covered a song for a classmate who had committed suicide. At the beginning of this year, she wrote the music to a poem a friend had written in remembrance of their classmate, Calyx Schenecker, who was murdered in January 2011.

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Betsey started posting videos of herself singing original and cover songs at her piano on YouTube in September 2011, the beginning of her 12th-grade year.

“I was pretty shy about my music before that,” she said. “Like, I would play for my school—I’d play concerts—but I didn’t want to share my music because I was embarrassed about it. But my senior year I kind of decided people aren’t going to see me after this, so I can kind of throw myself out there and not care what anyone says.”

She now has nearly 35 videos on her channel, and classmates ask her for digital versions of her songs so they can listen to them on their iPods.

“It’s sort of spread a bit more than I expected,” she said.

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“Papercut Houses & Trees” took about 4-5 hours of solid work to record, Betsey said. She uses GarageBand, an Apple software application that allows users to create their own music. There were eight or more tracks (drums, vocals, hand claps, etc.) to record, and she had to record each track separately.

“It’s about a boy, clearly,” Betsey said of the song.

About a year ago, she met a boy, who lives in California, and has been dating him long distance.

“The song is kind of about our future as I would like to see it, I guess,” she said. “And it’s pretty much saying ‘I know that we can’t be together now, but in the future I’d like to have this life with you.’”

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Last month, Betsey was planning a bike ride with Taylor, who has been her friend since fifth-grade. They talked about riding on Bayshore Boulevard the next morning instead of around Temple Terrace like they usually do.

At 6 a.m., Taylor showed up with her Nikon D5000. Dodging joggers, Taylor filmed Betsey singing the song on Bayshore as the sun rose.

“None of it was planned,” Betsey said.

“We came back here, and we weren’t expecting to finish shooting the video—we were going to wait a day or something,” she added. “But we got home and we just wanted to see what it looked like, and we couldn’t really see what everything looked like until we had the rest of the video, so we just kind of decided to keep going.”

“Plus, we had been up since 6 a.m., and I was just ready to conquer the day,” Taylor said.

They did all of the filming and editing in nine hours.

“We got it all done, and it was awesome to do it in one day,” Taylor said.

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In a few weeks, Taylor will start taking classes at the and plans to study mass communications. She’ll also be on USF’s cheerleading team. She said she wants to look more into videography.

“It was a lot of fun, and I love stuff like that,” she said.

Betsey will attend Barnard College, a private women’s liberal arts school in New York City. She said she’s thinking of majoring in economics or anthropology and wants to become fluent in Chinese and join an a cappella group.

She said she’d love to get into performing live in front of an audience.

“I really want to put myself out there in a coffee shop,” she said.

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Betsey watches her hands on the piano as she sings the end of “Papercut Houses & Trees.” The song is personal, and Betsey knows she’s “putting herself out there,” but she smiles confidently at the end, unafraid to share her music with those who want to listen.

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“Papercut Houses & Trees” Lyrics:

Day breaks, and I patiently wait for the coffee.
In time, I hope to break my silly dependence.
Shirt tied, my baby was only here in last October.
Love dies, I suppose, but here I lie to you.

And I wonder why my mother talks to trees;
and I wonder: where are my childhood set of dreams?
The sky darkens as the dusk brings me back in.
Into a set of these papercut houses and trees.

My body aches for the city life.
Remember that plan we used to talk about at night?
I see December: we walk Central Park and just love each other's air.
And our apartment is small, but we both don't mind some stairs.

And I wonder: will you ever just not care?
And I wonder: is 5 years really fair?
You are so very far away from me, and I just want to start our life
in papercut houses and trees.

And I'll wait till the sun goes down,
and we'll promise to live our lives out loud.
I'll free us, I'll free us until you know
it's time, darling, to come back home.

Day breaks, and I wait for you to pour the coffee.
I look out, and I see our papercut houses and trees.

See also:
Behind-the-Scenes with Amateur Music Video Creators