Interview: Steve Morgan of STRAIGHT NO CHASER at Palace Theatre

Steve Morgan combined his head for mathematics and his heart for performing, majoring in both mathematics and music at Indiana University.

Eventually his heart won out.

Morgan -- one of the founders of and a baritone for the a Capella group Straight No Chaser -- and his bandmates are taking to the highways and byways for their HOLIDAY ROAD tour. Straight No Chaser will make a stop here Dec. 2 at the Palace Theatre (34 W. Broad Street in downtown Columbus).

“It's a blast every night,” Morgan said in a telephone interview from Auburn, Ala. “One of the great things we get to do with our show is sing the best music from the last 80 years really. We're having a lot of fun with it and the audience is getting up and dancing along with us.”

While it may seem like an odd double major, math and music have a lot more in common than you might think, according to Morgan. In fact, every member of the IU mathematics department played some sort of musical instrument when he was at Bloomington.

“I don't know that I can explain it, other than just my mind seems to work somewhat well with both of those areas,” he said. “There’s a lot of inherent math in music, especially in the music theory part of it.”

However, even as a math major, Morgan realizes Straight No Chaser has put up some impressive numbers and items on their resume. The group has:

* grossed over $1.5 million in ticket sales, not including the current 62-city tour that started Oct. 22 in Huntsville, Ala. and ends Dec. 31 in Palm Beach, Fla. with four stops in Ohio;

* made over $3 million in record sales for its 11 records, including seven Christmas albums;

* won the Contemporary A Capella Recording Award for Best Holiday Album in 2009;

* played in such Chicago landmarks as Wrigley Field, Comisky Park, and Navy Pier as well as Carnegie Hall;

* performed with the likes of Elton John, Paul McCartney, and Stevie Wonder.

And all of this started by a series of accidents. In 1996, Morgan, Jerome Collins, Walter Chase, Patrick Hachey, Mike Itkoff, Charlie Mechling, Dan Ponce, David Roberts, and Randy Stine formed the group as a splinter group from the Indiana University’s Singing Hoosiers Show Choir.

“It was one of those things where we just kind of started on campus and began picking up steam,” Morgan said.

Their big break came when SNC was invited to compete in an a Capella invitational at the University of Illinois at the last minute.

One of the group’s members was friends with The Other Guys, an a Capella group at the University of Illinois. When a group abruptly canceled out of an Illinois competition, a member of the Other Guys frantically phoned SNC to see if they could play there that evening. Within an hour, Straight No Chaser was making the 168-mile trek to Champaign for the competition.
“We ended up getting a standing ovation at the end of our set,” Morgan said.

Morgan realized his group might be on to something then but success was nearly a decade away. In 1998, the group recorded a video of a playful version of The Twelve Days of Christmas.

The video tape sat on a dusty shelf for nearly a decade before the birth of YouTube. The Straight No Chaser video resurfaced on the online video sharing platform in 2007 — and by 2008 it had over a million views.

By then, most of the Straight No Chaser original members were no longer at Indiana. However, the group reformed and Atlantic Records signed SNC to a five-album deal.

“It's just the happiest of accidents,” Morgan said with a laugh. “That's why we're just loving every moment of it because none of it's probable.”

Yet, at the beginning of the group’s success, Morgan almost walked away from it.

After spending a few years after college trying to crack into Broadway, with roles in the original production of MAMMA MIA and in GOOD VIBRATIONS, he rejoined SNC. However, when he and his wife Emily were pondering starting a family, Morgan took a hard look at the demands of being on the road and followed the numbers side of his brain.

Morgan left the group and began working as a banking analyst at Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati. But the passion for singing never left him.

 “(While I was working at the bank) I was always happy to sing at a wedding, to go out and sing karaoke with friends,” Morgan said. “I was missing that part of my life very much at that point in time.”

A member of the group phone Morgan to say a singer had left the group to start a family and asked him if he wanted to rejoin SNC. After talking things over with Emily, he agreed to come back.

“It's one of those the grass is always greener (on the other side) type of things,” he said. “At the end of the day, I realized (music) makes me a happier person. When your focus is putting smiles on people's faces, it's hard to be in a bad mood.”

Morgan said there was a week or so of overlap while he was touring with the band at the same time he was working at the bank.

“I took a week of vacation and did a bunch of shows,” Morgan said. “We had two shows in Charlotte on a Sunday. I had to take the first flight out and Monday morning, I went straight to the bank. I kept thinking, ‘Yesterday was a lot of fun. Now, here we are, back with a spreadsheet. Let's rock.’”

It turns out performing in an a Capella group after a few years off is like riding a bicycle … down Mount Everest. Some of the material was based on the original shows the group did back at Indiana, but there were 15 to 20 songs and routines with which he was unfamiliar.

“After everybody at my house would go to bed, I'd go sit in my backroom and just work on music,” he said. “Then in the fall, we did a Chaser Summit out in Las Vegas where each night was a totally different show. I think I had to learn about 40 songs to get through the weekend. It was like drinking water from a fire hose.”

Today, Morgan, his wife Emily, and their two children — Lily, 16, and Will, 13 — have learned how to balance life on and off the road. The group wrapped its 90s Part Two tour, which ran July 8 through Sept. 6, and after a 46-day break, Morgan was back on tour for Holiday Road. This tour features original members Morgan, Chase and Collins and later additions to the group Seggie Isho (a baritone, who joined the group in 2009), Michael Luginbill (tenor, 2008), Luke Bob Robinson (bass, 2024), Jasper Smith (baritone, 2020), Tyler Trepp (tenor, 2009), and Freedom Young (vocal percussion, 2022). 

If there’s a downside to being in Straight No Chaser, it’s being away from family for much of the year, especially during the holiday season.

“Luckily my kids are at the age where they understand why I am gone,” he said. “Some of the guys have younger kids who say, ‘Don’t go, Daddy. I’ll miss you.’ That tugs on your heartstrings.”

Still, Morgan said that connection with audiences makes the travel worthwhile.

“Being on stage for those two hours a night, trying to make people forget whatever’s going on in their life and giving them something joyful — that’s unbelievable,” he said.

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