pentatonix what is good i know you're excited about 2021 because you have this album on pre-ad right now and apple music which we were just playing some music from which sounds fantastic and so i guess to bridge the gap and to give us something that you know we really need in our life you brought us another christmas offering which is
really great so congrats on that as well that's awesome thank you can you remember the first conversation that ever happened amongst the the original members of the group where you even discussed the idea of doing a holiday album i don't i don't remember i think it just naturally happened we had just come out with our first ep and then just it kind of naturally just
fell in yeah and christmas and a cappella goes so well together so i think it was just kind of like a no-brainer but i don't remember the specific moment we decided um there's a fun answer for you when it comes to choosing the curveballs that now are just pentatonix classics but like doing the daft punk which you've spoken about many times i'm sure
before but at the beginning when you when you're thinking about doing that it makes sense when you hear you do it but i guess when you think about it you're like wow can we can we do that i mean that is like french timeless electro club music how are we gonna do that you know what i mean like how do you get that point you think yeah darp punk is fair game
we're all really big fans of daft punk dan i think we recognize the uh the influence that just runs so deep in almost every genre and um even so many pop stars work with them and are so influenced by them and i think we just really wanted to get it right so i remember that arrangement specifically taking a long time and being very detail-oriented and
meticulous um because there's there's so much ground to cover when it comes to daft punk i think you know when you first came out everyone was just so drawn in by the chemistry and by the ability that you had to create music and you know and you took the idea of a vocal group to a whole other level um and they're sort of before pentatonix and after pentatonix
you know now there's a lot more people trying things and and using their voices in lots of different ways but there must have been somewhat of a pressure or i can only assume that there would have been a subliminal pressure for you to stay in a certain area to be more performers than you are artists in order to try to continue just to sort of walk that line
and i feel like you pivoted pretty quick out of there and we're like no we know what we're good at but we also have something that we want to say was there a tug of war at any point there where you had to really wrestle for your own independence in order to be able to make your own creative decisions and not lean into someone else's 100 i mean you know when we started i
think we focused on what was um what we knew we could do extremely well which was use our voices and we weren't sure if we had anything to say until we finally got to 2015 and made that first album and we realized okay that album was really hard to figure out what we wanted to say and then i think from 2015 to 2020 when we started
obviously we have this new album called the lucky ones coming out we all did individual projects that allowed us to think through what we individually like to think about and want to communicate so that when we finally came in 2018 or 19 we were starting to write for this album we were so much more clear on our feelings and what spoke and we knew ourselves much better
you know the things that we all individually had experience in all collectively experience as well so that when we say the lucky ones we feel that we feel so lucky that in a world of you know produced pop music are very simplistic in a sense because it's a naked voice sound but the complexity of our arrangements could have a place here oh holy night is the name of the song
tori kelly herself stepping into the holiday spirit and bringing music into our lives that we need at this moment in time you know a really great human being caring human being with an incredible voice someone who could easily hold someone's attention just with her voice as well uh has anybody got a tory kelly story they want to share with the
world right now in apple oh my gosh i definitely do no i thought you will remember this this is the when she did um the arrangement of uh wonderland exactly exactly and she came to the studio and we just asked her to do some passes and literally every take was perfect it was the hardest time vocal comping i think we have ever had it's definitely
the hardest phone call ever i was like can we release four versions of the song because she did something completely different every time it was so dope and so perfect one of the things that you know you all identified pretty quickly i think was that you know you use platforms to leverage and leverage found your audience and then recognize that the audience was
loyal and you could go and you could build your own boutique experience was that scary moving independent and deciding to do things more yourself after the show we were so excited to have a record deal and then they instantly dropped us we were independent but we used youtube to kind of grow an audience organically and connect with fans directly
and then got millions and millions and millions of subscribers pretty quickly and and that gave us leverage to have this amazing deal with rca who's been amazing and it it felt triumphant and amazing and like to be questioned because i remember in the meeting they were like we just don't believe in this we just really don't believe in this this is like lame
i also think that the our relationship with the fans it was very organic it wasn't like uh let's make sure you know i feel like everyone that had watches on this thing off everyone that had reached out we were also so grateful and young and thankful for all that they were doing and all the support that was given um so i feel like when we do that when
we do have the connection with the fans it is incredibly natural and that's why i feel like as a as a pentatonix family everyone we are so connected and bonded um i think winning the show was a moment for us for sure and then when youtube was taking off like our very first video like 300 000 views in the first day and we were like oh people connect with what we
make and youtube is amazing platform to showcase that so let's make a million youtube videos 18 million subscribers or something now so that was really just like uh that confirmation when we were going viral one of the few songs you can hear right now from a forthcoming album which is due mid-february from pentatonix um which is going to be a huge moment
you know i wonder about whether or not you've been waiting until until february 2021 uh whether or not your plans changed like everybody's did in 2020 and uh and how that's affected the way you've moved forward with this with this album and and you know how this year has played into the idea of a new record at all i mean you know it's funny when we found
out that we weren't able to go on to our our europe tour in march we were kind of devastated because we hadn't been to europe in such a long time but you know the good thing is that we had actually finished recording all the vocals before we were scheduled to go to europe so we said you know what let's take the time to actually finish this mix it master it so it did
afford us that time and i'm thankful because now we are so unbelievably proud of this album we're we feel like the lucky ones to to be able to put this album out when you think about this album now are there themes and feelings from this year that have formed some kind of sub subversive nature in the dna of the record oh yeah i mean before even the pandemic
and everything that's happened this year the whole theme of the album was healing overcoming something self-acceptance and and then obviously the pandemic hit and we all need to heal even more and yeah we're all going through these things and so yeah i do think that everything going on helped us really like tie a bow on the album what is the
holidays for you and in particular how are we feeling this year i feel because i've been anxious this whole year i feel so grateful that we get this bus stop to like take a break and like experience the holidays and and feel a little joy and have a little family time and before whatever next year breaks yeah you know this is a time for us all to work in our
on our micro and what matters to us as individuals so that we can create greater self-awareness for the macro right and we can try to heal things on a much larger level and i feel like if you can't be any more vulnerable than using your voice which is what the whole world needs to do right now that it must be and i'll just say it there must be moments when there's
pentatonix you think like are we gonna have a moment here are we gonna use our voices in a different way are we going to create a a song or a moment or a concert or an event or something that allows us to unite our audience around something that we care about as a group has it crossed your mind have you talked about it we've definitely felt the weight of
everything and the fact that we're five very different individuals that can still come together and be one unit i feel like that's the main thing we continuously try to represent as we put out music that we can be very different but it's not divisive that's what's going on in this country and it's kind of nice honestly if i may speak honestly that everything
kind of blew up in a way because now you get to see the real hurt and that pain and you have to figure out like he said what's the micro here that i need to think through so that when we come together the healing is truly um solidified rather than being kind of like a wobbly foundation we need a real foundation and i hope that we show that
our foundation has been strong even through our the division that we have not division in that sense but just the differences that we have like we need that what what are you listening to right now what's on your playlist right now yeah man i don't know if i have an album but i feel like a vibe like my dad is from nigeria so afropop having
its moment right now is so unbelievably important to me so like yeah you got whiz kid you've got thames you've got just uh bernard is killer right now i'm so happy with his last album and like you know pete did he did his thing with it and so i'm just like that that has been a vibe because there's so much joy in that music and he just does it so
right okay let's go what's left i just got engaged awesome congratulations really exciting so we're like listening to holy but justin bieber a chance like on repeat you know dancing around the house everything you know all that kind of thing like we're really just happy sam smith to die for love goes the album yeah kevin that was you huh just his vocal on that it's
so nice the record's so smooth but when he says that lyric i just want somebody to die for i i lose it every single time i mean i got married last year so i'm on his same train and just like i feel like i finally found that someone and i can actually say that and be like man i i felt it anything he does any choice he does vocally is the right choice