There are so many facets to BettySoo, it almost seems silly to boil her story down to a few witty paragraphs. She's a Korean-American who loves to eat dinner for breakfast, and she's a Texan singer-songwriter who grew up in Spring, just north of the Houston city limits. She was raised in a house alternately filled with Beethoven and Depeche Mode, yet she crafts songs with a clear pop-rock drive and the occasional folksy twang. Just over two years after she released her debut album Let Me Love You, the Austin songstress has returned to the studio with producer Stephen Doster by her side to record a second, brighter album, Little Tiny Secrets, along with Never the Pretty Girl, a 4-song EP recorded initially as an exclusive bonus gift for her fans. She decided, on second thought, to manufacture more copies of the EP, but not for profit. Instead, all proceeds from the sale of the EP will be donated to International Justice Mission, a non-profit human rights agency that rescues victims of violence, sexual exploitation, slavery, and oppression. (More information at ijm.org) During these two years, her career has taken a steady climb, highlighted by a trip to London in the summer of 2006 at the invitation of the City Showcase Festival, performing multiple official showcases. While Let Me Love You featured songs about past brokenness and heartaches, Little Tiny Secrets is upbeat. Featuring radio-friendly melodies and the pop guitar licks Doster’s known for, her new album confronts her experiences fresh from being on the road, from the long, slow climb of the music business, to the lifestyle of playing the bar scene. “In the first album,” explains BettySoo, “I was writing for the first time. For many of those songs, I was dealing with hard emotions I held for a long time and had finally come to terms with. Now, I’ve been able to write more about things to come and situations I face today, and I’m feeling freer to write about things I find funny. Still, my heart – and my songwriting – tend to be drawn most to things that are broken.” Stay, the third track on her sophomore release, is clearly about things that have broken. Images of a flooded landscape and families lost to a storm merge with swelling strings and intimate, spare vocals. And the vocals are hard to miss. While BettySoo has garnered plenty of recognition for her songwriting, it is her voice that shocks then wins listeners over at every show – including seasoned radio deejays sitting a few feet away from her in the studio. Then again, there’s not much about BettySoo that isn’t surprising. Sometimes, people are surprised just to see her take the stage. Plain-faced, petite (“five feet short on good days,” as she puts it), and freckly, people don’t have any idea what to expect. “I guess Asian-American singer-songwriters aren’t all that common,” she comments, “at least, not in Texas.” In fact, she regularly gets greeted after her shows with praise comparing her vocals to everyone from Ruthie Foster to Sheryl Crow to Joan Baez. Then, of course, there’s the whole issue of her name. How did a second-generation Korean end up with such a classic southern name? Is it a stage name? “No,” she answers, laughing, “I guess I’m just lucky that way. It’s right there on my birth certificate: Betty Soo Kim. Soo is my dad’s middle name, too. Yep, he’s a boy named Soo.”