Bobbyisms: Ken Yates may kill your productivity

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: DREW REYNOLDS
Ken Yates

I write about random things a lot. I write a lot about random things. If you're the type who likes to listen to music while you work or study, you're likely no stranger to the struggle for attention that ensues as the music and your concentration both try to occupy your grey matter.

Alan Cross wrote on the topic on his website in the last month, reflecting on how difficult it is to be productive with music playing in the background. “It turns out that I've been listening to the wrong music,” he wrote a couple of weeks ago. “According to Will Henshall, the founder of a start-up called focus@will, my problem is that tend to put on music (that) I like.”

Listening to music that we like triggers the release of dopamine in your brain, Henshall indicated in his address at the Musictech Summit in San Francisco in February. Dopamine is one of the chemicals in your brain responsible for controlling your emotions, and as your mood changes, your productivity is impacted. In contrast, your mind will tune out less appealing music more easily.

Firmly within the canon of music that will distract you is Ken Yates. Although born and raised here in London, Yates studied songwriting at Boston's Berklee College of Music and followed his music to New York, where he currently makes his home.

Yates' time in Boston culminated not only in his emergence as a commanding songwriter and performer, but also in the opportunity to perform for Berklee alum John Mayer, who wrote in praise of the young performer on his blog.

Now Yates is returning home thanks to a tour with indie-folk powerhouse Peter Katz, a stint that will see them in Kingston, Waterloo and Toronto before a performance at Aeolian Hall on March 16.

As if that weren't enough, next week sees the long-awaited release of his first full-length album twenty-three, and there's a chance that he'll be bringing copies of the album with him.

“I feel like I may not have arrived at doing what I'm doing if I hadn't gone to Berklee,” Yates admitted recently. “They throw so much music at you ... the first few years I struggled to figure out what I wanted to do. The EP definitely describes where I was at when I was at Berklee — it was my first time recording, I wanted everything to sound very polished, very perfect.“

According to Yates, a couple of years of experimentation inspired him to enroll in songwriting courses and began to find his sound more rooted in folk music than in the electric rock style he had been pursuing.

But not without intrepidation; students were expected to bring a new song to class to be shared, dissected and analyzed in open forum, an unnerving thought for many new artists. In fact, Yates admitted that learning to trust outside individuals — like producer Joran Van Der Voort, who helmed both the EP and the new album — with his vision was at once his biggest and most rewarding challenge.

Now a couple of years later, he's got a better grip on his sound and the direction he wants to take.

“For this record we went back to old folk records from the 1970s and tried to figure out why they were so good, and it's because they're so raw and organic. We wanted that direction this time, we tried to play a lot of the music live in the studio to capture that feel.”

For more on Yates, his coming album twenty-three or his short tour on March 16 with Peter Katz, visit him online at kenyates.com or follow on Twitter @ken_yates. Tickets for their show together at Aeolian Hall are $15 in advance or $20 at the door, which opens an hour before show time at 7 p.m. Tickets are available online or through the Aeolian Box Office.

And for more of the latest in music news, views and wandering troubadours, consider following this column on Twitter @fsu_bobbyisms. I won't promise not to tinker with your dopamine levels, though. I'm out of words.