Student Union Board (SUB) announced Friday that this year’s fall concert performers will be hip hop/R&B artists Hoodie Allen and Sammy Adams.
“We think they’re going to be really good. Their music is similar enough to where they’ll fit in well together,” senior SUB executive director Louis Bertolotti said.
A committee began meeting over the summer to narrow down the choices for performers based on budget and scheduling, among other factors. The University has rejected artists in past years, which the committee kept in mind when making the final decisions.
“We went with a country artist in the fall last year and a more rock-based group for the spring, so we wanted to mix it up,” senior Kendall Gaspari, head of the artist decision committee and the lead concert programmer for SUB, said.
Once the committee finalized the decision, the choice had to undergo a rigorous approval process by Student Activities Office. After this was completed, the Notre Dame legal staff worked with both Hoodie Allen’s and Sammy Adam’s agents in contract negotiations to finalize cost, location and other details, which took a few months to finish.
“We send a contract over and they modify it and send it back to our legal counsel and it keeps going back and forth,” Bertolotti said. “We actually announced pretty much the day after we got the signed contracts.”
This will be Hoodie Allen’s second time performing at Notre Dame. He previously opened for Third Eye Blind at the 2012 spring SUB concert.
“We hope every time we pick an artist — you can’t please everyone — that the majority of people are going to come out and have fun,“ Gaspari said.
This is the second annual fall concert put on by SUB. Before the restructuring of the program, SUB had sponsored one big concert and two small ones a year, but found that the big concerts were more popular.
The SUB concerts are almost entirely a student effort, from choosing the artist to assembling the stage on which they perform.
“It’s going to be a fun time; it’s a good group of artists and a lot of fellow students put a lot of work into this,” Bertolotti said.
The doors open at 7:30 p.m. and Sammy Adams will begin at 8 p.m., followed by Hoodie Allen.
Hoodie Allen, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, is an independent American rapper who rose to fame after quitting his job at Google to pursue music. His most recent album “Happy Camper” was released in 2016, after success with his breakout EP, “All American.”
The opener, hip-hop artist Sammy Adams, released his debut album, “The Long Way,” in March 2016 and is well known for hits such as “All Night Longer.”
Tickets can be purchased for $15 at the LaFortune Box Office from Monday to Thursday or $20 at the door. Each student can bring up to four ID cards to buy one ticket per ID.
