Does Pentatonix have the voice for radio?
Some days, Pentatonix’s Scott Hoying feels as if he’s living a movie montage, and Beyoncé’s I Was Here is playing behind him. Hoying and the four other members of the a cappella group certainly have been leaving their mark since winning NBC’s The
Sing-Off in 2011. They’ve released three studio albums and a handful of EPs and YouTube covers, and they have a self-titled album of original tunes out Friday. The quintet’s That’s Christmas to Me was one of just three albums released in 2014 to sell 1 million copies last year, along with Taylor Swift’s 1989 and Sam Smith’s In the Lonely Hour. Can’t Sleep Love, a single from Friday’s album, is making a bid to put Pentatonix on mainstream radio.
“We’re living a dream life,” says Hoying, who sings baritone in a group that also includes Kirstin Maldonado, Mitch Grassi, Avi Kaplan and Kevin Olusola.
For the past four years, Pentatonix has steadily built its audience through touring, recording and a strong social-media presence. The group has 3 million Facebook and Twitter followers and 9.1 million subscribers to its YouTube channel.
“We didn’t really have a fan base to begin with,” says Olusola, the group’s beatboxer. “We kind of had one with The Sing-Off, but it was relatively small. Now, with all these fans that have been with us throughout this journey, we have people to sing to.”
Pentatonix will need that fan base as they try to pull off two dif- ficult transitions at the same time: Moving from performing remakes of popular tunes to songs they’ve written themselves and trying to break out of the niche audience of a cappella music and into the pop mainstream.
With a repertoire approaching 100 songs, the members have become well-acquainted with how pop hits are structured by breaking them down and rebuilding them with vocals-only arrangements. But it’s a long way from knowing how a hit is built to actually building one.
“Being in the industry, you have to know the ins and outs, the formulas, how everything works,” says Grassi. “We learned even more working with pop writers.”
Even if Pentatonix came up with the right material, the number of a cappella records that have succeeded at radio in the past 50 years is small: Bobby McFerrin’s Don’t Worry, Be Hap
py, Billy Joel’s The Longest Time and, if you allow drums, Queen’s
We Will Rock You. Beyond those, there’s not much.
Hoying says he listened to a lot of music during the recording process, seeking inspiration. “Every song I was listening to, the hit song had 50 million layers of different sounds and synths and noises,” he says. “I was like, ‘ Oh, man, how are we going to do this?’ ”
In one case, the group brought in a ringer: Jason Derulo joins the group on a cover of R&B vocal quartet Shai’s 1992 hit If I Ever
Fall in Love, arranged after the two acts appeared on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
“Jason was there in another dressing room, and Kevin just walks into his dressing room,” Hoying says. “I’m cringing, because you can’t do that to another celebrity.” But the two singers exchanged phone numbers and wound up recording the song in February, the day after Pentatonix won its first Grammy.
The Grammy, for best arrangement, instrumental or a cappella, came for Daft Punk, a track the group recorded in a bedroom closet. Now, though, they’re in a real studios with real budgets. Whether or not Can’t Sleep
Love takes off on the radio, the members Pentatonix have built an audience that not only appreciates their music but identifies with them personally. “It’s people that have been in choir or band or musicians who have experienced the joy of singing with other people,” Hoying says. “Once you’re in a choir and the harmony happens and you get chills all over your body, it’s an experience you never forget.”
“Now, with all these fans that have been with us throughout this journey, we have people to sing to.” Kevin Olusola