Daft Fame: More from the Carleton Singing Knights

In Issue 46, Tom Fry, Carleton senior and Singing Knights tenor, gave Paste a glimpse at the inner workings of the Internet's most popular college a capella ensemble. Here are some outtakes.

On song selection:
“It's a pretty democratic system: Each term, we all bring three or four songs to the table, and once everyone listens to them, we discuss which ones we'll sing and who should do the arranging. Democratic doesn't necessarily mean efficient-- this process usually takes a good 3-4 hour chunk out of our rehearsal time at the start of every term. Some of us are pretty picky.”

On the Knights' evolving repertoire:
“The Knights have been around since 1955, and the trajectory of the group has changed a lot with the times/members of particular groups. In the past four-ish years, indie music has crept into our repertoire because that's the music that some of us happen to like listening to. It's not really about specific genres, though. It's about picking music that we think is good, and that our friends will enjoy listening to/being introduced to. I think most groups hold some fundamental assumptions about what an a capella song needs to be, and that limits what they feel comfortable adding to their repertoire. The Knights were this way for a while, but we've started to notice over the past few years that we have the most fun when we just choose what we like.”

On fan favorites:
“Students have been really receptive to our more esoteric turns, for the most part. Daft Punk was a huge success. Vampire Weekend and Grizzly Bear went over really well. Some students know the songs we do, some don't, but most people enjoy the songs either way-- I've had a lot of unlikely people come up to me and tell me that they've been listening to Yellow House on repeat since we started singing 'Knife,' which is really rewarding. Our Daft Punk video inspired a now-much-more-famous Carleton student to record the original Daft Hands video-- he was roommates at the time with the guy who films us.”

On accidental Internet fame...:
“The YouTube thing actually happened rather serendipitously. A friend of mine had his camera at a concert a couple years back and filmed 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger' and 'Chicago' and just posted them. He still posts them. We've never had any active involvement in the process whatsoever. I remember getting a call from him about how 'the Sufjan video has, like 2000 views! That's, like, the entire school!' Now, 'HBFS' is over 3 million views, 'Chicago' has some hundreds of thousands, and most of our others have hit at least 20 thousand. It's really bizarre. The fact that we are even a small internet sensation still blows our collective mind.”

...and its unanticipated rewards:  
“Grizzly Bear posted our 'Knife' video on their blog and thanked us for the arrangement, which made me irrationally giddy. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, one of the smaller acts we've covered, played a show at Carleton and called us up onstage, which was also pretty awesome. One of them came up to us afterwards and said, 'Our label thinks we're huge because of you guys. They gave us an extra $2000 for recording.' It's cool that we could do that for them-- they're an under-appreciated band. ('Glue Girls' is a great single off their new album, by the way.) That's probably the best part about covering indie acts. I can actually conceive of these guys watching our videos and getting a little bit excited, or at least flattered.”

Watch the Knights perform Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" with the aforementioned much-more-famous Carleton student":
 

For more videos of the Knights' performances, check out bassnowbrdr's YouTube channel. To hear studio recordings of the Knights' arrangements, visit the group on MySpace.