Chimes’ arts and entertainment reporter Natasha Jayaputra spoke with Jack Droppers, director of the Student Activities Office (SAO), to get a taste for what’s coming this fall.
Chimes: Can you share some of what’s coming this semester?
Droppers: We have a lot of exciting concerts that are coming up. Our first touring artist of the year that’s coming through is on September 21st —Vienna Teng will be here. It’s just a wonderful sort of piano-driven folk-pop music.
Molly Parden, Eliza Edens and Louisa Stancioff will be here on October 11th. Then Brian Dunne, who was named the best country album of 2023 by Rolling Stone, is coming in November. I think it’s on a random Tuesday, so there’s nothing else that you can do on campus other than be at this wonderful concert. Then Twen and Eric Slick are coming later in November and there’s another artist that is coming on December 6th that I’m not allowed to announce yet, but it’s going to be in the chapel and it will sell out.
Chimes: Is there anything that you’re personally excited about?
Droppers: There are two shows that I’m particularly excited about. One is the Brian Dunne show in November because I haven’t really had a country artist since I’ve worked here. So I’m excited to see how that goes and how I’ve had a lot of students come and say that country is their favorite genre. And even though he’s not necessarily a top 40 country artist, he’s making really interesting and thought-provoking country songs, which is exciting to me.
The other one would be in January. We have an artist named Half Waif who used to be the bassist for another band that’s really popular called Pinegrove, but now is making solo records. And I got to listen to her record back in May. Her agent sent me a pre-release and it is incredible. It might be one of my favorite records of the year. It comes out in October, so it’s not out yet, but it’s so good and I’m so excited that she’s coming here in January.
Chimes: How do you choose what you choose?
Droppers: There are three kinds of ways that we choose artists. The first is an agent will approach me and say, “Hey, this artist is touring through the Midwest. Do you have this date open?” And then we’ll engage in a conversation.
The other is I have a relationship with a few agents who just want to send every tour. So a lot of artists that are maybe on smaller agencies know Calvin and love Calvin, so they’ll just send me, “Here are all my artists; tell me your dates”.
The third one – which students can actually get involved in – is a group that’s starting this Thursday that will meet in the Center for Student Engagement.We’ll talk about how do we engage with pop culture, how do we engage with music as Christians, what does it look like to listen to the new Kendrick single or the new MJ Lenderman’s album and talk about it through the lens of our faith.
That group actually just helps decide who we bring. So if I have an agent who sends me an artist, I will bring that artist to this group of students and say, “Hey, help me discern, is this a good fit for Calvin? Is this somebody that we want to bring on campus?” So anyone who is a Calvin student is welcome to join us at that Thursday group.
Chimes: Can students recommend artists/bands/films?
Droppers: Yes, we have a recommendation form on the SAO portion of the Calvin website that we check every so often. And my one deal with people who use that form is if they send in a recommendation that we’ve never heard of and it begins a conversation with an agent and we end up booking them, then I give that person free tickets. So if there’s ever somebody who’s just like, “I like this artist who I think is up-and-coming and would be a great fit for Calvin,” and they recommend them, that’s a great place to do it. If you want to recommend Taylor Swift or Kanye West, it’s probably not the best place to recommend them because I know that you like them.
Chimes: The student body is kind of changing. In some ways, it’s becoming more international. What kind of plans do you and your team have to expand the international culture here?
Droppers: I think this is something that we are always thinking about how we create relationships with artists and agents who represent non-American artists. And we’ve had conversations with agents about artists bringing artists to campus. It is an interesting thing when you think about the music industry in general within America in that artists have to have a work visa in order to perform here, and so we’ve had shows that were very close to happening. And then they lost another show on the tour. So it didn’t make sense for them to fly out to do a few shows in Grand Rapids.
But I think one of the things that I hope for with the SAO and with our concerts and our movies is that every student at Calvin could see themselves represented in something that we do. That it would be an artist that we bring it would be in the movies that we show. And if there is somebody who’s like, “Hey, I don’t feel like my culture, my people are being represented,” like I’d love to have that conversation of like, how can we do a better job of doing that? Because so much of the music side of things is a balance between us, the artist, the agent, the industry, the money.
That it’s not always as easy as, you know, we want to have a band that represents every country of, I don’t know how many, hundreds of countries that Calvin embodies. But rather like how we can expand what we do so that everyone can see themselves on stage or on screen.
