In 1991 I was watching PBS, maybe a little self-conscious that I was too old to be watching it, and I saw something new. A game show featuring kids answering geography questions in an attempt to catch animated crooks working for a character named Carmen Sandiego. The set was dressed up to look like a city street out of an idealized New York City from the 1940s with some modern updates. The entire aesthetic was inspired by what we would call “Utopian Scholastic” today. And providing all of the music, including the very catchy theme song were a quartet of guys dressed vaguely like flamboyant detectives performing all of the music with no instrumental backing. They were called Rockapella. I thought they were the coolest people alive and would instill in third-grade me a love of acapella music and singing that would last my entire life.

I’m just a guy who likes to sing on occasion and likes to read a lot about his favorite bands and artists. Some of my favorite bands were huge names that have already been talked about to death, but with a cappella music being a more niche genre, not a lot has been written about Rockapella that doesn’t appear on Wikipedia or their own website. So, I’m going to write about them myself. I want to go over every album in Rockapella’s discography and give my opinions about some of my favorite tracks and my feelings on the group as they evolved and as members would cycle in and out.

Before I dive into the discography proper, I want to lay a bit of groundwork. I’m not a professional biographer or Rockapella scholar and I certainly don’t know any of them personally. What I do know is that the group was founded in 1986 at Brown University by Steve Keyes (high tenor), Sean Altman (tenor), Elliot Kerman (baritone), and David Stix (bass). Stix wouldn’t stay in the group very long and was already replaced by Charlie Evett just a year later. They would make an appearance on The Morning Show which would land them a gig with PBS called Spike Lee & Company - Do It A Capella which showcased several a cappella groups. By this point, Evett had also left the group and was replaced by Barry Carl. This would be the formation of Rockapella that would appear on the special performing their version of the calypso standard called Zombie Jamboree.

That would lead to Rockapella becoming the house band for the afore-mentioned PBS game show. But before the show began taping, Steve Keyes would end up leaving and was replaced with Scott Leonard. This would the lineup throughout the Carmen Years with vocal percussionist Jeff Thatcher joining in 1993.

This is the lineup that would encompass what I call the Sean Altman era. This era sees Rockapella doing the PBS show while also flying to Japan to record albums thanks to Scott’s connections to record labels that they didn’t have in the US. This era of Rockapella has a bit more bite to it, mostly due to Sean’s song-writing being a bit more blue than what Rockapella would mostly end up known for. There’s also a pretty even spit (at least among the Rockapella original tracks) between songs written by Sean and those written by Scott (with the other members writing a few songs and the rest being written for Rockapella by other collaborators like Billy Strous and David Yazbek.)

I’m not sure who else might be interested in this. Maybe there are other die-hard Rockapella fans out there. Maybe just folks who were fond of the old Carmen Sandiego show on PBS that didn’t even know they were a group outside of that TV show. Hell, I’m not sure I realized that they were an actual band until they popped up in a Folgers commercial years later.

Whatever your reasons for reading this, I hope you enjoy it.