I was all set to tell you another story from college and thanks by the way to listener Tony who reached out to me to tell me he’s enjoying the week of college stories here on your daily lacks but I was going to tell you a story about a time some friends and I were on a scavenger hunt and we drove to Canada to get a picture of ourselves by the welcome to Canada sign here was the problem I told that story on episode 579 of this very podcast so if you want to hear that story go way back to an episode from August of 2023 August 3rd 2023 an episode called three car stories was three stories about driving in college and I told that story I’m not going to tell that story I’m going to tell a different college story so get fired up here it comes your daily Lex I’m going to tell you stories about college acapella I my freshman it probably have told some of these stories in the podcast to it so the podcast has a lot of content but anyway I was a freshman I was very very new I was seeing a girl who would later face murder charges I’ve told you about that but anyway at the time as far as I know she hadn’t murdered anyone and she was encouraging me that I should audition for the acapella groups and she told me like which ones were the best ones and she told me that spur-of-the-moment was the best acapella group and so I signed up for their audition form and then I signed up for one other groups audition form because I thought they had a cool name they were called up the octave then I found out that up the octave was an all-girl acapella group and they had assumed that I was a girl when I put my name on the list because my name is Lex which could go either way but so I didn’t audition for that one but I went in an audition for spur-of-the-moment which indeed was the biggest they called themselves the premiere acapella group at Brandeis and I auditioned singing a snippet of the song one week by the Barenaked Ladies and I had this good audition and they had me sing the first line of the song Moondance it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance but they would keep giving you new starting keys to see if you could just transpose it in your head and sing it in the new key fine then I think I’m all finished I’m pleased with what I’ve done and the musical director the oldest guy in the room as well because he was a grad student he’s like hey we’ve heard you sing fast could you also sing slowly for us and I was like oh this is terrifying now now I feel very dumb like he thought this was a poor song choice to sing one week by the Barenaked Ladies which has as you may know many fast lyrics I was mostly showing off that I knew them and he’s like yeah why don’t you sing happy birthday and so I pointed to a random person in the room was like what’s your name and he said it’s Matt and I said okay I’m gonna sing happy birthday to you Matt which I then did so a couple days later I have a voicemail and the voicemail starts with the president of the a cappella group a woman named Sam laughing hysterically and I have many voicemails that started that way because my voicemail greeting remember voicemail my voicemail greeting your brain is was you want to leave a message for Lex what the and then the beep would come as I started to say and like it was really it took me a couple tries to nail it but it was perfectly timed where it truly sounded like it was bleeping me and she was just laughing hysterically at that she’s like well the good news is you’re in spur and it turned out they’d accepted me and my I think at that point future buddy Jake everybody else had been asked to come to callbacks but they were worried we were gonna also audition for voicemail the all-male a cappella group of Bandai’s and they wanted to get us before voicemail did it turns out Jake had audition for voicemail but I was planning on doing that so but they got me and spur had this policy that they told you about at the audition process oh that’s right they asked us to go to callbacks even though we were already in because they wanted to hear how we blended with called back people so they were telling everybody callbacks yeah we have this policy spur first you need to come to you need to make us our your priority we have three rehearsals a week for three hours at a time from 7 to 10 p.m.

and if you miss more than two you’re out and so I was like I’m gonna accept this but I’m a freshman in college there’s no way I can handle that kind of commitment so if and when it becomes too much I will just quit turns out it didn’t become too much it worked out just fine but it was crazy I think I took one semester off to do a show possibly to I think just one and then when I did the show and spur and I just worked around things that’s right but so the acapella did great we recorded two albums during my time there and we sang on on the morning show on CBS we competed in the international acapella college acapella competition thing which is basically what the movie Pitch Perfect is about we lived it we sang at Lincoln Center we did the competition we came in last I think but yeah I would say like a healthy percentage of my college life was centered on being in this acapella group at some point I guess my second year of college I auditioned for another a cappella group at the same time the Jewish pop a cappella group the Jewish coed a cappella machine monkey no just Hebrew for melody and my junior year I became the musical director of that one while I was still also in spur and then my senior year I became the musical director of spur and you know just another person in monkey now now at monkey now in spur first where I ended up arranging a lot of songs that’s you know when you figure out what all the vocal parts should be for this different acapella song that was fun monkey nah I did a lot of that but I also started writing songs for us so I wrote several parodies for us of real songs that were Jewish themed so like I wrote a parody of stand by REM after we don’t get pics parody of stand called spam I wrote another song called spam but it was about how spam isn’t kosher at all so where Michael Stipe is saying stand in the place where you are now face north I we would say spam isn’t kosher at all can’t have pork hilarious I had a parody of every morning called every Purim we parodied the Muppet Show theme song with a song about getting ready for Shabbat oh the fun we had in college and monkey now also recorded an album we released that album and that album I’m gonna get I want to get his name in my head it was called songs from a world tour of the east coast oh college anyway that is stories of singing in college I never did quit spur I made spur first I just also did lots of other things I was just very good at managing time a skill that I have kept anyway that’s all I got and I hope you’re having a wonderful Thursday Lex