FIVE QUESTIONS WITH STRAIGHT NO CHASER
Of the original nine singers who formed Straight No Chaser, six are still singing with the a cappella ensemble. Seggie Isho is one of them, a baritone who admits he once considered a cappella singing “kind of boring and stiff” until auditioning for Straight No Chaser.
Isho answered questions about their Tivoli performance in a recent phone interview.
Q Who writes your arrangements and thinks up those mash-ups?
We have a few guys who do all the arranging. We write all the lyrics to our parodies. We do everything in house.
Qsongs How do you decide which will go in the show?
We ask our fans on Facebook and Twitter what they want to hear added to the set. They take priority over what we want to do. There have been songs we think the audience will really love and we get a lukewarm response. Those songs get booted and replaced. It takes about a week on tour to really know how the audience feels and what we might continue.
Q Is this a holiday show?
Since it is before Thanksgiving, we aren’t doing a full holiday set. But there will be some holiday songs trickled in to give people a little taste.
Q What’s new in this show?
Jerome Collins is going to be channeling a specific performer we haven’t tackled before. It’s super high-energy, funky and a lot of fun. There is another song where we get the audience involved and we will debut a new parody medley. I can’t give too much away because we want that element of surprise.
Q Straight No Chaser has stopped at the Tivoli twice in recent years. Why is a third concert worth the cost of a ticket in your opinion?
Obviously, they came back a second time, so they like our music. We like to make sure our show is ever-evolving. We never put the same show out in the same city twice. We want to make sure we honor the songs they expect to hear and are coming to hear, but we’re going to give them some new stuff.
People always tell us this is the only concert they can bring their children and grandparents to. Everyone will find something they enjoy whether it’s the comedy, the old standards or songs they hear on the radio today.
Also, we’re extremely good-looking!