BU Today Sessions

Vikesh Kapoor began his musical career in the third grade, with a very deliberate effort to play “Yankee Doodle” on the piano.

“I stopped going to lessons and taught myself the second half of it by ear,” recalls Kapoor (COM’09). “I enjoyed performing the song so much that something changed in me after that.”

Along the way from childhood to adulthood, an arm injury nearly dashed Kapoor’s hopes of playing music full-time, and he decided to study photojournalism at the College of Communication as a way to keep telling stories. 

“It’s the same action,” he says. “Photojournalism is just a different mode of storytelling — a different mechanism and different muscle.”

Kapoor’s musical stories seem to have wide appeal. He has completed several regional tours through the Midwest and Northeast, as well as a 30-date national tour last summer. Locally, he says, he had the honor of performing at a memorial service for BU Professor Emeritus Howard Zinn. Most recently, he has been nominated for Boston’s Best Folk in the Boston Phoenix 2010 Best Music Poll.

While music is now his primary means of storytelling, Kapoor still returns to the camera from time to time. At the very least, he says, “when I’m traveling around from town to town, I carry a camera with me.”

“Whereas with photojournalism I’ll tell a true story,” he says, “in a song I can tell a fictitious one. And that can sometimes reveal a truth better than a truth could ever do on its own.”