I started playing guitar at the age of 4 (circa 1975). Writing my own songs followed suit shortly thereafter. I was always involved in the music scene from my early teens and as I got older, I started putting my own bands together. I began playing Hollywood before I was of legal drinking age. The clubs would make me stand outside until set time! As soon as I was done, I had to pack up and leave the club. After many years of hustling with full-time jobs and spending about 20-30 hours/per week focusing on my music (triting collabs, session work, playing with bands), my fellow writing partner, Jennifer McElrath and our band, Red 5, got signed to Interscope Records. We made 2 studio albums (Matt Wallace, Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie to name a few producers) and toured heavily long before internet existed. What is an email? We were represented by CAA and had a publishing deal with Warner-Chappell. Imagine a time when bands had to rely on pagers, calling cards, scrap change for pay phones and a large oversized Atlas roadmap to find their way to the next gig! That was my life for many years much to the dismay of many elder relatives. By the late 1990's Red 5 parted ways with Interscope. I went onto to work for music companies and over the past 25 years have developed my career experience and business skills across multiple media platforms. The roads always lead back to music for me! Most recently, I was VP of Operations for a Los Angeles-based music merchandising company for 7 years. I have released solo work under my name "Beth Carmellini", we posted all of Red 5's catalog on Spotify and in 2019, I added new music on Spotify under the writing project name "The Wicked Wives" with my writing partner, Jen. Her music can be founded under "Mostly Sunny". Between the 2 of us, we have amassed a large volume of material and we are still writing together. I recently attended a SITM event where Alicia Keyes and Jody Gerson where presenting the statistics of women in the music industry (artists, writers, engineers, producers, road crew, sound, etc) and I was shocked at how low the %'s were! My fellow ladies.. we need to pump these #'s up!! I have shared these stats with many of my fellow writers in the hope that together we can pave new paths for the wonderful, talented, amazing women in music and for the generations to come! I love what She is the Music is advocating and I'm hoping Jen and I can connect with other fellow musicians to champion this cause!! Let's do this!!