Students join the musicians on stage to sing along.
Doane’s Student Programming Board (SPB) hosted another event in their series, titled “Coffee Shop Series.” The premise of the series is that the SPB brings in artists or groups of artists from the surrounding area and has them perform here at Doane University.
For this event in the series, SPB decided to bring in Jack Rodenburg and compatriots, who all come together to do singa-long covers of popular music. Some of the songs that were played were, “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads, “Linger” by The Cranberries and “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen.
The people that were playing with Jack Rodenburg were as follows: Malcolm Purple [drums], Andy Vaggalis [mandolin and guitar], Jonah Bennett [bass], Hendrik Viljoen [saxophone and ukulele], Jenn Deuer [mandolin, ukulele] and many others from Lincoln.
It is worth mentioning that the people mentioned above all did vocals, even if it was not listed. Also, students were invited to sing on stage, in a volunteer choir of sorts and to “vibe with us.”
Senior Julia Ramirez sings a solo.
This is not Rodenburg’s first time performing on the Crete campus. “The people, the sweet sweet people. Sang some songs, met some friends, and they told me they had a piano, that’s what brought me here,” Rodenburg said.
Outside of Rodenburg’s musical career, he also is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, with an emphasis in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior (EEB). On his Instagram account, he has a series where he gives fun ecology facts. However, he is torn on whether he still wants to pursue a Ph.D.
“They are both chomping at the bit for my time. TBD on that, we’ll see, I never feel as eloquent on a QWERTY keyboard than I do on the piano, my guam is a lot higher on this thing, so it’s like insights per second,” Rodenburg said “Grad School is something that I am trying, but the music is the substrate, where everything else goes.”
He ended by saying, “I don’t think it’s going to go much longer in the Ph.D. direction, and would go much harder in the piano-playing direction.”