![]() Putting his faith in a cappella’s growing regard, Atlantic Records chief executive Craig Kallman, who’d seen the video, reunited the group and signed Straight No Chaser to a five-album deal. The grainy video of the 10-man outfit harmonizing and interweaving holiday standards had earned 8 million views during a time when amateur singing had exploded thanks to reality TV competitions like American Idol and America’s Got Talent. ![]() That chance came in 2008, after Stine uploaded their college performance of “The 12 Days of Christmas” to YouTube. … I always hoped we’d do something again.” “We all graduated around 2000, but we always set it up to be a legacy group from the very start. “That helped snowball things into the fall,” Stine says, when they began recording an album and then placed second in the 1998 National Championship of Collegiate A Cappella at Carnegie Hall. Their mashups of the era’s boy-band pop songs eventually gained traction and sold out shows, leading to small gigs throughout Chicago. To appease new listeners, the group stuck with easily identifiable classics (Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time” and Toto’s “Africa,” for example) that would appeal to multiple demographics before evolving into more complex, multi-song medleys. “We never overhyped the fact that it was just singing at first.” That way, people didn’t come with a preconceived notion that they weren’t going to like it,” Stine says. “We tried to make it more like a college band. In between late-night rehearsals and sourcing sheet music, they’d put up concert posters that never betrayed the fact that the music was being made sans instruments. Unlike many Ivy League schools, Bloomington’s campus didn’t have an a cappella scene, so the group had to get creative to build one. When Straight No Chaser formed at Indiana University in 1996, Randy Stine knew that he and his fellow vocalists were starting from scratch.
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