Knoxnews's Wayne Bledsoe interviewed Sarah Bettens and his article was published on Friday, March 14, 2008:
From Antwerp to Santa Cruz to East Tennessee, Bettens' choice is Johnson City
Belgian-native Sarah Bettens says, as a teenager, she insisted she'd never move from her hometown. Then she began spending most of her year touring with the band K's Choice. "Now I feel like I can live anywhere and be comfortable."
Sarah Bettens is a long way from home, but home has come to mean something different to the Belgian-born pop singer.
"Making the move from Belgium to Santa Cruz, Calif., and then Johnson City, Tenn., was pretty drastic," says Bettens, in a call from her home in Johnson City.
Bettens is best-known as the vocalist in K's Choice, which had an international hit with the song "Not an Addict" in 1996. The group went on hiatus in 2003.
Bettens moved to Johnson City to live with her partner and her partner's two children six years ago. Her second solo album, "Shine," was released in Europe in late 2007 and will be released in the United States soon.
"I've really grown to love it here," says Bettens. "When I'm in Europe for three weeks I really crave being back here and watching people take time for their kids and not having every wife have to work to make ends meet. People have a pretty high standard of living here - even people not making tons of money. So many other places in the world everyone is just scrambling just to make the monthly overhead."
She says she enjoys simpler things in East Tennessee - making new friends and just spending time with her family.
"We're close to the lake and we go camping and we're close to Asheville, where we go a lot. I've really grown attached."
Sarah and Gert Bettens (Sarah's brother) started K's Choice in early 1993 in Antwerp, Belgium, after both had been in a band called the Basement Plugs. After Sarah got some interest for a solo single, she and Gert recombined efforts to create K's Choice (the name is a reference to Josef K from Franz Kafka's novel "The Trial").
While "Not an Addict" became a hit in countries around the world, Sarah says the video was not added to MTV's playlist.
"'Not an Addict' was so obviously not a pro-drug song," says Bettens. "If you took a half second and listened to it you'd know there was no way I was advocating drugs, but just the fact that that was the subject matter made it super-sensitive. ... People are so scared that you're going to cross the line and they'll be responsible for it."
K's Choice earned a good following in Europe and Australia and a respectable audience in the United States. However, after a decade with the band, Sarah says the siblings needed some time apart. The two have just recently begun working on some new material together after a five-year split. Gert will, in fact, join Sarah at her Knoxville show and the two will perform both solo and K's Choice material.
Although it retains a pop edge, Bettens' solo work has an almost Americana feel to it. Bettens says her songwriting has benefitted from living in different places.
"So many things are almost brainwashed into us as we grow up," says Bettens. "That's how our parents see it or that's how our country sees it. You don't have the opportunity to see it from someone else's side. Having lived in so many different places, I feel like that has made me a lot less black and white than I used to be and a lot more forgiving. There is so much gray area that I really didn't really know about 10 years ago."
She also says that being in a good and happy place in her personal life allows her to write from the perspective of others more easily, rather than always relying on her own life for material.
"I definitely don't feel like I'm running out of things to get angry or happy or sad about just because I have stability in my life. I feel it a lot when I go back to Belgium: You just have a lot more credibility if things are going bad for you. If you had a bad childhood or there's some drugs involved, those are pluses! Being the daughter of a pediatrician and having a pretty cushy childhood and my parents are still together - those are things that work against me!"
Bettens laughs.
Granted, many audiences seem to prefer their artists to be tortured and depressed and some artists do seem to create their strongest work when they are in the worst emotional shape.
"I hope that's not the case," says Bettens, "because I'm going to make some really bad records over the next couple of years!"
She laughs.
© 2008, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
I have that one in black, and it's my favorite.
and I've heard loads of songs I hadn't heard in years. Talking about eargasms! Here are a few:
Woo-hoo! 
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