Author: Michael Witthaus

Beyond a cappella with Naturally 7

Close your eyes is the advice Roger Thomas gives fans seeing his group Naturally 7 for the first time. Because even though there are only seven singers on stage, their sound always causes listeners to wonder: where’s the band? Along with lush harmonies, a guitar, keyboards, bass and drums are in the mix. The trick — the miracle really — is it’s vocal only, group members mimicking instruments while others sing lyrics.

Technically, it’s a cappella — music that’s all voice and no instrumentation — but it’s so different that Thomas, who founded Naturally 7 in 1999, decided a new name was needed.

“We coined the phrase ‘vocal play,’” he said by phone recently. “To let people know it’s something else.”

Called Seven until a Southern act with a copyright forced them to change the name, N7 was an all-singing group at the outset. Fate intervened, however, in the form of a chance meeting with a music superstar.

“We were in a bookstore, and the owner said, ‘Hey, Stevie Wonder’s here, I want you guys to sing for him,” Thomas recalled. Wonder seemed to enjoy their version “Amazing Grace” but at the end “he was like, ‘I know who your favorite group is’ — and that’s how he left.”

Thomas quickly deduced Wonder wasn’t paying them a compliment.

“He was saying that we sound just like Take 6, and he knows they’re our favorite group,” he said. “From that point on — this was just before we formed N7 — I was like, ‘We’ve got to find a way to make it something of our own.’”

Later, on a long car trip, Thomas’s wife and mother-in-law grew tired of his a cappella cassettes, except Swedish quintet The Real Group’s song, which included eerily lifelike vocalized instruments. “They both said, ‘That can stay in … it’s not a cappella.’ I was like, that’s it! We’re going to be the first on the planet to imitate instruments as the mainstay of the group. Not just a little piece of a show like so many people do, but all seven of us have to figure out what instrument best suits us.”

N7’s unique brand of vocal play has carried them across the globe and led to a lot of memorable collaborations. A management connection resulted in a tour with Michael Bublé, who wanted an opener that wouldn’t add any equipment to an already crowded stage. “He was thinking it would probably be good to have an a cappella group,” Thomas said. “We were supposed to do one leg … we ended up doing three world tours and won three Grammys with him. That was eight years of our lives.”

Coldplay’s Chris Martin once watched them in London and invited them to hang out in his London studio. “They were singing one of our songs, ‘Wall of Sound,’” he recalled. To return the compliment, N7 learned “Fix You” a few months later. “It seems like the obvious one to do, but we’ve got to do it, man. It’s just the power in that song has everything to do with what we do.”

Their upcoming show at Tupelo Music Hall will mix Naturally 7 at the Movies, with selections like “Axel’s Theme” from Beverly Hills Cop, “Jailhouse Rock,” “Shaft” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” along with Christmas songs both standard and original — “Satisfaction Guaranteed” shines among the latter. As always, they’ll do “Fix You,” which has become de rigueur.

“People get upset if we don’t do it; it’s part of who we are,” Thomas said. “We want to leave people with something that’s uplifting, even more so than just the circus part of our voices and the vocal play. We love when people give us credit [for doing] this vocally, but there’s nothing like people saying the music touched them for a lifetime…. ‘Fix You’ is that type of song.”

Thomas set out looking for a distinct sound.

“I want someone to know it’s Naturally 7 within the first couple of bars, like it is for Earth Wind and Fire, the Temptations, Bee Gees or Beatles,” he said. “That’s how you know you’ve created something special.

It was a big lift, and at the start success wasn’t certain.

“You don’t know for sure that you can accomplish this, but you’re going to try, and we were able to do it,” Thomas said. “It’s definitely a dream come true to go around the world now. Because the goal was to get out on the stage and have everyone not believe it. That’s the key mark … get to the point where people say, ‘I don’t believe it.’”

Featured photo: Behind the Seams: My Life in Rinestones by Dolly Parton

A fan’s gift guide

It’s the holiday season and once again time to make a music fan’s eyes and ears light up like a Christmas tree. From modest to mammoth, and across a range of ways to access their passion, here are suggestions for your special someone.

If your giftee’s passion extends to creating music, check out Teenage Engineering, a Swedish company that makes the Pocket Operator, a line of mini synthesizers that resemble a calculator and sell for under a hundred bucks. If you’re feeling extravagant, the company has introduced the EP-133 KO II, a larger device with exponentially more groove and sequencing power; it’s $299 at teenage.engineering.

For the audiophile on your list, there’s the AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt, a device that bypasses the crummy audio delivered on cell phones and laptop computers to truly leverage the enhanced sound offered by streaming services like Qobuz and Tidal, $199 at amazon.com, and for phones it’s a good idea to include an adapter in the gift box.

Or you can keep it simple while still turning it up to 11 with the Marshall Kilburn II Bluetooth Portable Speaker. Befitting its brand, the “stout-hearted hero” weighs in at five and half pounds and boasts the loudest output of anything in its class, while providing more than 20 hours of portable power with a single charge, $199.99 at marshallheadphones.com

Maybe your music maven is a purist with a throwback bent who loves only vinyl. Help them keep their prized albums clean with a Boundless Audio Record Cleaner Brush, perfect as a stocking stuffer at $15. But don’t give the leash without a puppy — there are many music box sets on offer this year.

Jason Isbell marked a decade since his breakthrough solo release Southeastern with a quadruple-vinyl, triple-CD edition that has the remastered studio LP along with a live version and demos of every song, with special packaging, $79.99 at amazon.com. The seemingly endless flow of Beatles music and the final drop of so-called new songs from the Fab Four continues with a repackaging of their Red 1962-1966 and Blue 1967-1970 albums, with a total of 21 previously unreleased tracks, $69.99 at amazon.com.

Wanna feel old? Green Day’s Dookie is turning 30 and the Berkeley punk stalwarts’ first big release has the deluxe treatment, with a six-LP (brown vinyl, natch) box set that includes a bevy of tchotchkes to go with outtakes, demos and live takes, including four songs from their notoriously mud-splattered Woodstock ’94 set, $121.32 at amazon.com.

Dolly Parton answered her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by inviting a big chunk of its membership (and Kid Rock) to work on Rockstar, her first rock ’n’ roll record. She even reunited the remaining living Beatles, along with Peter Frampton and Mick Fleetwood, for a version of “Let It Be.” It’s available as a four-vinyl album box set for $59.98 at amazon.com.

There is no shortage of books for the music fan. For superfans of the aforementioned Ms. Parton, give Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, a fashion-focused autobiography that peeks into the singer’s closet and is packed with more than 450 color photos, $25 at amazon.com.

To (extravagantly) mark the 60th anniversary of Beatlemania for your favorite fan, give 1964: Eyes of the Storm, a collection of photos taken by Paul McCartney with his 35mm camera from the end of 1963 through early 1964, the years when The Beatles blew up into an international phenomenon and altered the course of music history. It’s $77.79 at popmarket.com.

For those growing misty-eyed for the early days of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and other flannel-shirted rockers, Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner’s Mud Ride: A Messy Trip Through the Grunge Explosion covers the evolution and growth of Seattle’s music scene, from DIY club shows to its Big Bang, which removed most hair metal bands from the earth. $28.79 at popmarket.com.

One of the latest classic rock memoirs is My Effin’ Life, from Rush bassist, keyboard player and singer Geddy Lee. It’s filled with anecdotes of his time with the prog rock power trio, along with personal stories of growing during World War II, with a grandfather who was murdered during the Holocaust. Novelist Michael Chabon praised the “warmth, care, artfulness, hard-earned wisdom and … gently skewed humor” in his book. $24.99 at amazon.com.

It’s always a good idea to keep things local. Here’s a thought: The next time you attend a show at The Shaskeen, Penuche’s, the Press Room or Strange Brew, pick up a CD and pay it forward by giving it to a loved one who’s unfamiliar with the performer’s music. That’s the most effective way to put cash in an artist’s pocket.

Of course, there’s always merch. Roots of Creation, one of the busiest bands around, offers a huge selection of T-shirts, caps, pins and posters at their shoprootsofcreation.com website. Sepsiss, the female-fronted heavy metal band that just won another NEMA, has a line of T-shirts calling attention to the insidious practice of pay to play, where clubs force acts to buy tickets to their own shows and re-sell them for payment, along with other forms of financial exploitation. Available at sepsiss.com.

A few musicians have side hustles as artists making very cool stuff. Singer-songwriter Dan Blakeslee, who played his first main stage set at the Newport Folk Festival this year, sells line drawings (also available as T-shirts) at etsy.com/shop/DanBlakeslee. Nick Lavallee, front man for Manchester power pop band Donaher, runs Wicked Joyful, making bespoke action figures and apparel like the Devil Church Explorer Club hoodie or a Taco Tour at Tender Town T-shirt, at shop.wickedjoyful.com.

Featured photo: Behind the Seams: My Life in Rinestones by Dolly Parton