Incubus, Roots musician goes 'Deeper'

As published in The Eagle on 11.06

At a time when most college kids are struggling to pass final exams and finding a job, Ben Kenney, the bass player for Incubus and former guitarist for The Roots, was already a professional musician.

"It [beats midterms] ... until you have to carry a bass amplifier up four flights of stairs to your apartment," Kenney said, who will perform at the Black Cat Sunday. "Doing that night after night for 50 bucks here and there, playing covers ... that was my college." 

Kenney's musical education began at age eight, when his dad gave him a drum set. But Kenney didn't limit himself to the drums for long. His parents would host jam sessions where he, his brothers and cousins would play for hours, switching instruments and giving Kenney a chance to experiment with other sounds.

"Where I grew up, everyone played everything," he said. "It wasn't unusual at all. You'd get laughed at if you couldn't hold down a beat on the drum set."

Kenney put his childhood jam sessions to work on his newest solo album, "Distance and Comfort." Released earlier this year, it features Kenney on all of the instruments and vocals. He mixed and produced it in his living room.

Though Kenney praised his experience with other bands, noting the growth and new perspective he gained from his time with acclaimed hip-hop group The Roots as well as the past five years with Incubus, he said creating a solo album was a good chance to learn new skills and "exorcise his demons."

Kenney also noted the added bonus of efficiency when recording a project entirely on his own.

"I don't ever have to explain anything to anyone, there's no social aspect," he said. "It's strictly going in and working."

Though it was a hefty project, Kenney called it a "low risk" endeavor compared to creating a record with Incubus.

"Knowing that there's billions of people across the world who are going to judge that record? That's pressure," he said. "For me, [solo projects are] no pressure. A lot of people look at it like it's something extra."

Being a drummer on 10 songs is what ends up becoming exhausting, he said.

"The easiest thing to do is to pay for it," he said.

But Kenney's creativity rarely gets exhausted. He called his writing and recording process a constant in his life, whether in the studio with Incubus or on tour promoting his own record.

"The faucet never turns off," he said. "This year I toured a bunch ... and I already have music written for the next record. Hopefully I'll write 10 more."

Kenney said he would rather pen a melody instead of a set of lyrics. He praised the ability to make a statement without words. But Kenney also acknowledged the challenges unique to singing. 

"Singing is the most intimate," he said. "Playing drums ... you can do when you don't feel like it and you can get away with it. For singing, you kind of have to deliver emotion ... or it goes south fast."

Still, Kenney's comfort zone is in the instruments and sounds he's heard and performed since elementary school. But he doesn't draw boundaries between genres of music; Kenney said he doesn't see that much of a difference. He compared it to the difference between playing hip-hop and rock.

"To me, it's the difference between playing a slow song and a fast song," he said. "It's just music."

Syndication!

I'm famous!

Syndication at work.

I'm not sure how or why, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.

Yamagata 'sinks teeth' into 9:30 club

as published in The Eagle Oct. 28, 2008

In a tiny dressing room upstairs at the 9:30 club, Rachael Yamagata sat on a counter, talking into her phone.

"Is that a good star rating?" she asked the caller. She listened for a moment and then said "That's a good sentence."

Reviews are still coming in on Yamagata's latest album, "Elephants ... Teeth Sinking Into Heart," but so far many have praised the veteran songstress for her lush harmonies and complex instrumentation.

Yamagata said she wrote the album on a keyboard, testing out the programmed sounds to create

 tones that would later become violins, oboes and cellos. Once she took the demos to 

an arranger, it became a challenge to bring the album to life with an orchestra.

"I thought about what supplied the right texture," she said. "I didn't think about how we'd reproduce it ... making the music mirror that lusciousness."

But Yamagata didn't need to worry about her newest songs translating well in a live setting. During her performance at 9:30 Oct. 28, she performed several tracks from the album that met audience approval. Along with Hotel Café tourmates Samantha Crain, Thao Nguyen, Jenny Owen Youngs and Meiko, Yamagata brought enough energy and charisma to ensure the audience had a unique and enjoyable evening.

Though no one performer headlined the Hotel Café Tour, the crowd clearly favored Yamagata, eager to respond to her between-song banter. Though she has been performing professionally for eight years, Yamagata's set resounded with a sense of maturity that most of the other performers couldn't quite match. 

Yamagata's main exposure to music came through performing in musicals at the girls' school she attended in Bethesda, Md.

"I didn't go out to see music," she said. Between practices for volleyball, softball, cross-country, track and play rehearsals, she had no time to attend concerts.

But studying theater in Chicago introduced Yamagata to her true calling - music. She followed a local band around until they finally let her join them as a vocalist.

"Music took over," she said. "I lost sense of time doing it. Being in a band, it became clear my passion was songwriting."

Relationships are the most common topic in Yamagata's writing. "Elephants ... Teeth Sinking Into Heart" is almost entirely focused on examining love and the aftermath of relationships through a myriad of lenses. Even though Yamagata is currently in a successful relationship, she doesn't think she'll ever lack relationship-based material.

"I'm never content," she said of her romances. Even when happy in a relationship, Yamagata added, issues and observations always pop up to create new tension and keep her writing.

But just because she's happy now doesn't mean she's not bitter about the past.

"If you've ever had anything end badly, then you are my soul mate," she told the audience before playing her last song of the evening.

But the final song hit a few snags when she forgot the lyrics to "Reason Why."

"Sing it for me," Yamagata told the audience as she kept playing, laughing and blaming the missed words on the alcohol she drank to calm her nerves. "You'll remember this," she promised at the end of the song, before exiting to the audience's enthusiastic applause - proving that once again, Yamagata didn't have anything to worry about.

Doug Funnie, Ph. D

as published in The Eagle, Oct. 30, 2008

At AU, teachers have high expectations for their students. But students also expect quality from their teachers. A teacher should be intelligent, reasonable and punctual.

It doesn't hurt if he's also a comedian.

Enter Doug Hecox, an author, journalist, public relations agent, adjunct professor in the School of Communication and professional stand-up comedian.

Hecox said it was not difficult to maintain his multiple occupations.

"Teachers and comedians have a lot in common," he said. "Each has a prepared course of information he or she wants to share with a group of folks who generally have not heard it before. The cover charge for college is much higher, but comedy clubs let you drink in class."

But Hecox's preferred class is Writing For Mass Communication, a course he has taught at AU since 2001.

"I like that the students are brand new," he said. "They come into this fairly green, as writers. I can watch their progress ... it's just more fun for me."

The fun doesn't just stay in the classroom. As a comedian, Hecox has performed at D.C.'s 9:30 club, New York City's Laugh Factory and, most recently, Denver's ComedyWorks, where he recorded his first CD, "Vote For Me," released earlier this month.

"I was very nervous," he said. "It was the first time I'd performed a set that long at that club ... I was pretty stressed about it."

Nerves didn't stop him from delivering outstanding material to create a genuinely hilarious debut. "Vote For Me" navigates the perils of illegal immigration, holidays and the political humor expected from a resident of D.C. Adding in personal anecdotes and sharp one-liners, Hecox keeps his jokes fresh and the audience guessing what presidential candidate he will bash next.

"I make fun of the Democrats because it's easy," Hecox said. "Someone says, 'Well how come you don't make fun of the Republicans?' ... Well, where do I start?"

But long before the jokes about presidential wannabes, Hecox found comedic pay dirt in the Crackerjack boxes prizes his parents gave him to keep him quiet on long trips.

"The [prizes] I liked were the tiny joke books," he said "I'd spend the rest of the trip memorizing one little riddle, and then we'd get to my grandparents', and I'd delight them with that joke I'd learned in the car."

Hecox enjoyed his first taste of an audience's approval and continued his comedic training by acting up in school. In high school, he competed on the speech team performing published, humorous material. By senior year, he had added his own jokes into the material and discovered the world of humor writing.

Comedy doesn't always stand the test of time because it depends so much on the audience's physical presence for success, but the written word can be consistently funny over time, he said.

"If you can come up with something that's really well-crafted, it's like sculpture," Hecox said. "Comedy is more like spatter painting."

His views on writing teamed with his background as a comedian made him the perfect candidate for teaching Writing for Mass Communication.

"Comedians are writers. They're writing their material ... they're getting it just right, and then they say it the same way over and over because that's the purest way," Hecox said. "Stripping away all the non-essential and getting to the bare bones, that is the essence of journalism."

Hecox said that with so many interests, he is lucky that they all complement each other, but he is careful not to blur the lines and be "a professor telling jokes."

"Trying to be 'on' all the time wears on people, and I worry that it could undermine my credibility," he said. "I think my keeping Writing and Teaching Doug, Public Relations Doug and Comedian Doug separated is a good thing. Psychologists call it schizoid. We're probably both right."

To hear Comedian Doug, listen to WPFW 89.3 FM Nov. 3 to 7 at 2:30 p.m. To purchase "Vote For Me," visit www.dougfun.com.

Titling a blog...

...is tough work.

Being expected to create a permanent name in under five minutes is even tougher.  But hey, I'm a reporter.  We thrive on deadlines.

The title for this blog comes from a quote by G. K. Chesterton, an English mystery novelist: 

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.  

I found that highly amusing - and worthy of a blog title.  

But as cheeky as it is (those Brits are nothing if not witty), it makes an important statement about journalism - we the media are the public's source of information.  We're responsible for telling them what they need to know.  People might not pay full attention to us, but we're all they've got. 

Nothing like feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders.

Selling Your Soul One Video at a Time

Weekends are generally spent watching TV, eating ice cream or reading a trashy romance novel.

But instead of comfort foods and mindless entertainment, I slummed my weary self up to the second floor MGC to talk to students I'd never met to talk about - go figure - mindless entertainment.

Of course, I mean YouTube. Friend of the procrastinator everywhere, home for water skiing squirrels and... an anthropological study on the newest form of communication on the web?

A study presented by John Wesch of Kansas State University at the Library of Congress argued that YouTube was a mirror for our culture and opened new lines of communication through webcams that would change the way our society related to each other.

But the students at American University disagreed, citing YouTube as entertainment that could have possible side effects of legit communication, but entertainment, none the less.

Almost all the students noted that instead of falling into the black hole of YouTube, they more often only visited the site when sent a link or when looking up a specific clip, averaging only five or ten minutes per visit.

This selective exposure to YouTube undermines what seems to be the popular cultural idea that YouTube is where college students and young professionals head when they've got nothing else to do - but that honor is really delegated to Facebook.

Out of the six students I interviewed, only one had uploaded his own content to YouTube (a video of him dancing in his dorm hall to "Since U Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson), and all of them spoke of video blogging with the distinct tone of pity and disgust that one might use when describing road kill. Video blogs were the product of attention-seeking, fake people, and they would never be caught dead pimping themselves for their webcam.

Another perception demolished.

So even though my weekend didn't entail the customary sugar and SVU marathon, it did facilitate smashing the academic views of YouTube, bringing it down to the level of the average Joe-the-College-Student, which is pretty cool.