More than a dozen years ago at Indiana University, an all male A Cappella group was born.
The goup, Straight No Chaser, reassembled and re-emerged with a new sound. Seven years ago, one of the members uploaded its cover of “12 Days of Christmas,” and it went viral. The president of Atlantic Records contacted them, and the success story was born.
Though the group rotated through more than 50 members throughout the years, 10 of them stuck around to bring the group’s music to a larger audience. Covering some older songs with newer hits, SNC released their fifth full-length album “The New Old Fashioned” at the end of October.
“[We’ve done] national tours, international tours, and we’re excited to be bringing our tour back to Baton Rouge,” SNC member Steve Morgan said.
“The New Old Fashioned” tour kicked off in Las Vegas on Oct. 16, Morgan said. SNC fans, known as “Chasers,” called the performance the band’s best show yet with the lights, music and choreography, Morgan said.
“The New Old Fashioned” tour brings current songs like The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” or Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” to the audience with SNC’s rendition.
“The album further features a number of Straight No Chaser’s incomparable medleys, including “Beggin’/Counting Stars” blending favorites from Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons and OneRepublic and “On The Road Again/I Play The Road,” originally by Willie Nelson and Zac Brown Band, respectively,” according to a news release.
SNC will take its show to more than 50 U.S. cities and then Paris for two weeks in 2016. With shows six days a week, SNC doesn’t have much time to rest its voices, Morgan said.
“If you keep your body healthy, the voice follows along pretty well. A lot of us go to the gym each day to try to work out the bugs of our body,” Morgan said.
Spending so much time together isn’t foreign for SNC. The members’ voices are in sync along with their personalities, Morgan said. He calls it a dynamic like no other.
“We’ve know each other now for half our lives, so we are a family as much as anything else, and we look out for each other,” Morgan said.
While SNC is still growing its fan base of “Chasers,” Morgan said its fans never cease to surprise them with support.
“We went overseas this past February. We had people saying, ‘We’ve been waiting for you to come here for five years,’ he said. “There are people in Prague and somebody came to our show and they drove four hours from Armenia or something to come see us. … Like, how do you know about us? That was one of the times it was really cool to see how the Internet and technology allowed us to take our sound worldwide.”