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