Recess: Heavy Metal Harvard

Lecturer Candice Crawford-Zakian remembers writing her first song. She was in elementary school and scribbled lyrics in the back of How Things Work, a book she had in her bedroom in Washington, D.C.

“It was an acapella, Sweet Honey in the Rock-type of song,” she says, referring to the all-Black female ensemble that started in the early 1970s. “My mother used to love Sweet Honey in the Rock and would listen to them every morning.”

When she turned 12, she decided that music would be her future.

“I was a huge Gloria Estefan fan,” she says. “I said to my parents, I want to be a songwriter.”

She continued to write, adding poetry and essays to the mix, and by the time she got to high school, she considered joining a band.

“I was very much into the alternative rock scene. Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains,” she says. “But given that I’m a Black female, and at that time, rock and hip-hop were very racially divided, it was hard for me to find people to play with. I didn’t start playing and actively participating in music until probably about 24.”

That’s when she joined her first “real” band, Red Pill Down, an alternative metal band that toured up and down the East Coast.

“I was singing and screaming,” she says. “I’m sure it was interesting to see a short Black young woman with these white guys in the early 2000s.” The band eventually “imploded,” she says, “as bands often do.” She stayed in the music world, though, working as a production assistant for an XM radio station.

“The cool thing about XM was they were really focused on crafting a whole sonic experience with each channel as opposed to traditional radio,” she says, meaning channels covered full artist catalogs. “On The Boneyard, the show I worked on, one of the classic artists would be Ozzy Osborne, but as opposed to only playing the hits that came out of Black Sabbath or Ozzy, we would go deep into the whole album collection. When you’re listening, you feel like you’re having more of an immersive experience. Today, if you listen to the same channel for more than 30 minutes, you’re going to hear the same song again.”

Eventually, Crawford-Zakian joined other bands, ranging from jazz to acoustic pop, and started doing solo work, including an alt-blues album she’s currently recording at Mad Oak Studios in Boston, where other musicians like Levon Helm and Aerosmith have recorded. She also shifted gears career-wise after attending a leadership development conference on unconscious group dynamics.

“It blew my mind,” she says. She applied to grad school and attended George Washington University, where she learned about psychoanalytic theory and leadership. She ended up teaching at the Ed School, specializing in leadership development and organizational dynamics courses for students in the Ed.L.D. Program.

Crawford-Zakian has shifted gears again, this time at home, with a new baby. Asked if her little one is decked out in band tees, she laughs. “I’ve been more preoccupied with reliving my own childhood,” she says. “I put her in a Cabbage Patch Kids onesie, instead.”