A cappella group Straight No Chaser takes another shot at music by reuniting for new EP and album

A cappella group Straight No Chaser has recently released a new EP titled “Six Pack, Vol. 2” and will be performing at The Wiltern Friday night. Straight No Chaser founding member and music director Walter Chase spoke with Daily Bruin’s Andrew Bain about the group’s history, musical process and plans for the future.

Daily Bruin: Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Straight No Chaser?
Walter Chase: We formed out of a larger choir at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., back in 1996. The 10 of us that were together then were performing on campus, just basically to sing and to have another outlet to perform. There wasn’t really a traditional collegiate a cappella group at Indiana at that point and … we just first started singing for fun at the local sororities and some of the dorms, and then we started doing our own concerts on campus and traveling to other schools. We recorded a couple CDs while we were there, as well as (filmed) one of our concerts in 1998, and the filming of that concert led to all of the videos we posted on YouTube about eight years later … and from that one of the videos was our “12 Days of Christmas” video which went viral in December of 2007. And based solely on that clip going viral … we were signed to a record deal with Atlantic Records in January of 2008.

DB: Take me a little bit through the group’s process of choosing and arranging the songs you perform.
WC: The way that we choose songs can come from an array of sources. It can (be) just a song one of the guys in the group really likes. … It can come from the record label or our management saying that they think we should do a song that works, or … for the most part, where a lot of our ideas (come from) is from our fans. … The suggestions that they send us (is) either in person or from our website, which is sncmusic.com. We are very interactive with our fans, since we started virally, our website has been a key driver for us to interact.

DB: How do you arrange a song to be performed a cappella?
WC: We generally write out most of our music. There are two or three guys in the group who are the primary arrangers ““ I’m one of them ““ and what (we) do is … put what we like to call “the Straight No Chaser twist” on it, which is to take a song which is traditional … and either put our special groove on it or just take it to just a different placement of the song so that it isn’t … an a cappella replication of the original song. … We’ve got guys who sing the base part, on some songs we’ve got guys who play the drums ““ or as we say “vocal percussion” ““ and then we have guys who sing solos and then everybody else is filling in the gaps of either tonality or imitating instruments, which is generally not what we do. We like to do more of a choral background or some kind of rhythmic kind of lick to go along with it. Our goal isn’t to try to sound like instruments. Our goal is just to try to sound like guys singing and at the same time try to give justice to the original song.

DB: What is a specific example of the “Straight No Chaser” twist?
WC: One of the most popular songs that we do is (Michael Jackson’s) “Billie Jean” that we’ve mixed with the Bell Biv DeVoe song “Poison.” (When) it starts off, you hear the “Billie Jean” riff going on, and all of a sudden out of nowhere, one of the soloists comes in and starts singing … (“Poison”). The two songs then … continue on for about four minutes and the two songs start to overlap each other where the two songs are happening at the same time. Its reactive, it’s something that grabs our audience.

DB: How did graduating and growing up affect the group?
WC: When we graduated from Indiana we put the whole thing to bed and went our separate ways. Some guys went into music. We had a couple guys who were on Broadway and a couple of guys who were still performing. The majority of the guys that graduated ended up going into what they had studied at Indiana, whether that was finance, whether that was teaching, (or) whether that was (telecommunications). … When we got the call that we got signed to Atlantic, we were living in different parts of the country and (had) to work our day jobs while we were first starting out. In the winter of 2009, we were able to start this full time, and we’re still all over the country … and the way that we get together is we’re on either tour or in the studio about nine months out of the year, so being around each other so much … that seems to be the way we’ve been operating.

DB: How long does it typically take until a song is ready to be performed live?
WC: It’s different for every song. It can be as quick as a day or two. We were in Tennessee … about a month ago, and we decided we wanted to do a version of “Rocky Top” while we were in Tennessee. Literally, the guys arranged it one day, we learned it the next and performed (it) the following day. So that’s one example. Other songs, like the song “Let’s Get It On,” which is a track off our new EP … we had recorded that in the studio back in January of 2009, and it actually did not get performed by us until this past summer. So, (there) was almost two and a half years of it sitting on the shelf … getting reworked … and then it made it on the album, the EP that we just released. So, that was almost three years from when that song first started. And, for some songs we’ll do an original arrangement of and want to tweak it or add something to it, and it goes away for a little bit. Or, it will take a week to arrange the song and then it gets brought back and … we have a choreographer (who) comes in and sometimes adds movements. So, a song can take anywhere from a couple of days, to a couple of weeks, to, in extreme circumstances, a couple of years.

DB: What are the group’s plans for the near future?
WC: We are still touring until the end of the year and then we, starting in February, are doing a tour of the UK, Canada and the United States for four months, so there is the reason we wanted to release an EP … because we have basically been nonstop touring, including a sit-down that we did for three months in Atlantic City this past summer and last summer, for almost a year and a half. And with the tour that we have coming up, we don’t really have any (time off until) June. So, what we’re looking at doing is ““ we’re trying to keep it under wraps ““ we have a special project in mind for our next full length CD, and we’re hoping to incorporate working with … some other artists (and) working with producers outside the group just to up the ante a little bit. … We’re very proud of our albums … but we’re … trying to find a way to reinvent ourselves for this next album, so that should be in the works for the coming year, and we’re hoping … to have something out by sometime in 2012.