• Run to the Sun, N.E.R.D.
• The Seed, Cody Chesnutt
• Last Nite, The Strokes 
• For U, Bilal 
• Star *69, Common 
• Take Me Out, Franz Ferdinand 
• All Falls Down, Kanye West 
• This Love, Maroon 5 
• Be Here, Raphael Saadiq 
• Back in the Day, Erykah Badu 
• Float On, Modest Mouse 
• Selfish, Slum Village 
• You, Raheem DeVaughn
• Gettin’ Grown, CeeLo Green 
• Sacrifice, The Roots 
• Made You Look, Nas 

When Joe Lapan, WCL/JD ’04, went to see Nothing but Trouble, Dan Aykroyd’s 1991 directorial debut, it wasn’t the comedy-horror’s storyline that resonated with him. It was the soundtrack—specifically music by hip-hop group Digital Underground that “just always stuck with me.”

Cofounder of Songbyrd Music House, an intimate live music venue and bar in DC’s Union Market, with Alisha Edmonson, SIS/MA ’11, Lapan has always loved a good tune. As a teenager, he would spend hours in his room listening to CDs and copying down the lyrics, line by line. During the pandemic, he earned an online degree in musicology. 

At Songbyrd, whose performers range from the soulful Kacy Hill to the spirited hip-hop duo Paris Texas, which “lit up” the venue when they performed there in 2023, Lapan is tapping into Washington’s distinctive music scene, where artists “aren’t all trying to be stars.”

For him, music is a kind of refuge, a place to “find yourself and others,” a space where “it doesn’t matter what else is going on.”