After Hours joins students and alumnae/i

With the last Vassar College Entertainment (ViCE) After Hours Showcase scheduled for tonight, you may be wondering: what will we do after hours, after After Hours ends? For seniors, there is an even more daunting question: what will seniors do after their hours at Vassar, when they no longer have access to such a unique community of arts programming? The answer is comforting if alumni Lawrence Louis '06 and Julia Weldon '05 are any indication. Their respective Vassar experiences influenced successful music careers; the two will perform their music at the showcase, alongside student musicians Taj Ribe '12 and Celia McKee '12.

"The event was conceived as a student, alumni, and faculty After Hours showcase and was an attempt to integrate the work that ViCE does into the larger Vassar community, rather than just the students. We wanted to bring these different segments together into one forum that would showcase the singer-songwriter talent that we have in the community," wrote ViCE president Peter Denny '10 in an e-mailed statement.
After Hours chair Kyle Moon-Wright '12 added, "In a greater context, it represents our attempts at a growing unity between musicians on and off campus.

The show will include a diverse array of performance styles, from the hip hop of D-lock to the more bluesy, folksy rock of Weldon. For student artists, the chance to perform alongside more seasoned Vassar musicians is both exciting and terrifying. "I'm a sophomore and this is actually going to be my first ever After Hours show, so I'm excited about it," wrote Ribe in an e-mailed statement. "I'll be playing all acoustic singer/songwriter type stuff that I wrote myself. I've been singing since I was five and playing guitar since I was 16, and I have had no formal training at all, just a lot of passion and motivation. There's going to be some alumni doing their thing which is both super intimidating and super awesome."

Super awesome is right: D-Lock and Weldon are both independent and self-produced, and the time they spent at Vassar inspired their current musical passions and aspirations. D-Lock, who recently performed at Vassar for Hip Hop 101's Throwback Jam, met Andre Dennis '06 freshman year when the two were randomly selected as roommates; The two now record together as D-Lock n MediK, with D-Lock writing rap lyrics and MediK creating the beats. Their first album, Crill Tone—"crill" a term meaning "crushing of skill"—came out in June 2009, and their second album, Official Language, is scheduled to come out in May. D-Lock has been working on his music career full-time for the past two years since the school where he was teaching in Washington D.C. closed.

"I was going to do a series of albums, but what ended up happening eventually was that I was unemployed, and I was just writing, writing, writing, some lines and some songs, and then I honed it, and called it Official Language. I felt like it told a story," D-Lock explained in a phone interview.

Weldon is already familiar with After Hours: she was an active member of the ViCE general body the year that the program started. Like D-Lock, she is also self-taught and has been playing guitar and writing songs since her early teens, a skill that really began to blossom while at Vassar.

"I started writing pretty good songs when I was 20. I still play some of the songs I wrote at Vassar, and people love them," Weldon said in a phone interview. "It's so funny to be going back, because I've brought back these songs I wrote at Vassar just recently, and one that I'm going to be playing I wrote on the Metro-North [Railroad] in my senior year—it's called ‘Southbound.'"

This show will be a great capstone to a year of wonderful After Hours showcases, but is also the beginning of a new trend. As Denny explained: "This would be a great tradition to start, to have students join together with alumni, faculty and any other administrators or staff or community members, and be able to share in the experience of music performance at Vassar." The final ViCE After Hours Showcase will be from 7 to 10 p.m. outside of the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film.