“This next song is the first song that we put out… that anybody really cared about. Ironically, I was making a joke on MySpace earlier, but this is the song that we put onto MySpace back when it was a thing [laughs/cheers]. Yeah. Just put the Millennial tag on us right now. We did break on social media, it is true. But it can be used for good regardless.” Ryan Tedder, in preface to the hit OneRepublic song, “Apologize”. A highlight of the 10th Anniversary of the annual Notes & Words: Benefit For UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland event that took place at Fox Theater Oakland on Saturday, April 27th. As per tradition, it featured both writers and musicians on stage, this year with Ryan Tedder & Drew Brown of OneRepublic, Jazz Mafia, Katy Stephan, and the Oakland School for the Arts handling the “notes” side of the show and Oscar winner, Helen Hunt, and Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Andrew Sean Greer, joining the stage with one of the key creative forces behind the event, Kelly Corrigan, taking care of the “words” side of the programming. Notes & Words is an annual benefit concert created to support the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, which provides the highest quality medical care to children throughout California. They announced that in the last 9 years, they’ve raised $12,150,000 with this event! I have heard that this year’s event on Saturday raised more than $3 million dollars.
