When Walt Chase was a young singer in the 1980s and ’90s, he listened to plenty of a cappella groups — Take 6, Rockapella, the Blenders, The Real Group. He liked trying to hit the same pitches as Take 6 lead tenor Claude McKnight.
Later, while working with another member of Take 6, Chase asked if McKnight could still hit those screaming falsetto high notes as he aged.
“I joked that I would be willing to come and sit in with them whenever they want,” said Chase, now 47, remembering his youthful bravado. “Now, I’m getting a little bit older, and it’s a lot harder for me to get up there. It is ridiculous, how much high stuff I’m doing on this tour. … I started really building up a couple months beforehand.”
Chase joined the all-male a cappella group Straight No Chaser in 1996 while in college at Indiana University. He returned after the group went viral in 2006 with its mash-up of “The 12 Days of Christmas” and has been singing and arranging for the ensemble ever since.
Walt Chase is a tenor from Pennsylvania who performs with Straight No Chaser.
Straight No Chaser’s annual holiday tour has become a perennial favorite in Madison, and this year, the Top Shelf tour stops in Overture Hall on Wednesday, Nov. 6. As of this writing, only the balcony has a fair amount of seats left.
Madison, Chase said, brings “definitely one of the most hype crowds we have every year.”
Chase, who lives with his family just north of Philadelphia, spoke with the Cap Times from Atlanta on a day off during the group’s 61-stop holiday tour. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been writing and arranging for the group a long time. What makes a song a good fit for SNC to cover?
Finding songs that work for an a cappella group is tricky. Obviously, we don’t have instruments to back us up, and being limited by just having nine guys as opposed to a full band. We don’t have any backing tracks when we perform.
Finding the right song starts with vocals, finding a song that has harmonies that will sound tight with what you would know as the original song. Then it’s being able to find a unique twist, whether it’s slowing the song down, doing the song in a different feel, groove-wise. If it’s a female artist, having one of our amazing tenors cover it, or finding a song that features our basses.
I like to find songs that are iconic, songs that people know and have heard hundreds of times.
Walt Chase, at center in glasses, has arranged many songs for Straight No Chaser, which he joined in 1996 as a college student and re-joined in 2008 when the group turned pro.
Is there an example of a new one on this tour?
We’re doing a cover of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” the Elton John classic. I had heard a version done by Sarah Bareilles at a live show here in Atlanta a decade before. There was a haunting quality to it. It was just her and her piano. I immediately heard vocals, I heard the opportunity for a choir.
There is a formula now that we’ve been doing it for so many years, when we hear songs that we consider a cappella friendly.
Do you ever hear the song of the summer and just have to fit it into the holiday show? Like — should we hope you’ll play “Hot to Go?”
Unfortunately we’re not doing that on this tour, at least not yet. Our audience is not necessarily a young, social media-savvy type of audience. It’s families, it’s adult contemporary. We steer toward already solid, known entities. We have “Lil Boo Thang” in our set, because we saw a chance to mash that up with “The Best of My Love.”
Over time we’ve become more of a planning group, where we put everything down onto sheet music and have learning tracks. We like to give our lighting team and management time to build out videos and social content.
But to have one of the songs of the summer become part of our set, we have definitely done that — we’ve had Bruno Mars dropping (a song) a month out (before the tour), and we know our group vibe works really well with particular artists.
I’m a former a cappella kid who over-listened to “The Christmas Can-Can” and “Who Spiked the Eggnog?” so let’s talk about originals. How do these evolve from concept to stage?
Those two specifically were products of an individual in the group. “Christmas Can-Can” comes from the same vein as our song that went viral, that got us back together, which was our “12 Days of Christmas.” It’s chaotic, very upbeat, obviously comedic.
The concept for the song in my mind was thinking about all the things you have to do (before Christmas). For original music, you own the copyright of it, and if you’re doing a parody — say we’re doing a parody of “Hot to Go!,” we would not own that copyright. The Can Can is public domain.
For “Who Spiked the Eggnog?” somebody had come in with the general chorus. The verses were a culmination of guys just messing around in the studio.
Some of the songs we’ve written recently have been done by one of our group members, Michael Luginbill, working with different songwriters in Nashville. He’ll bring the entire concept. Everything is almost complete by the time he comes to the studio.
Those early songs were trying to continue what our audience knows us as — a group of guys who started in college, who are a little bit silly, and don’t take ourselves too seriously. But can obviously hang musically, and make things creative, and sound as best we can.
