Community Corner

Singing A Shore Thing

Coastal Vibes, an eight-piece a cappella group comprised of four Hatboro-Horsham High School alums, plans to take on the Jersey shore this summer.

Boardwalk fries. Beaches. Amusement rides. 

If four alums have their way, a new, more melodic “attraction” could be a summertime lure at the Jersey shore.

Led by 2010 grad Joey Harrell, the eight-piece all-male a cappella singing sensation, dubbed Coastal Vibes, is sure to be a shore thing. Whether on the Ocean City boardwalk, or at the Margate Dairy Bar, the contemporary cover band can be heard harmonizing everything from Doo Wop favorites to top 40 hits and everything in between.

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“This has always been what I wanted to do,” said Harrell from a Horsham home where seven of the eight members converged recently following an end-of-year event at . “Since last summer I’ve been working on this whole project. (The idea was) to have dedicated members and guys who are going to get along right away.” 

And since the singers – fellow Hatboro-Horsham 2010 alums Devron Lovick and Tony Brooks, 2011 grad Andrew Channing, as well as members Ben Ackerman, Sean King, John An and Noah Farrell – will be enduring a “daily diet of Nathan’s and tanning” while holing up together all summer in a shared shore house, getting along is key.

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Living and working together sets a firm foundation for what Channing said is “like a singing fraternity.”

Indeed, Harrell rounded up fellow Johns Hopkins University students Ackerman, An and King from their shared interests on campus. Harrell, along with Brooks, Channing and Lovick, had comprised a cappella groups Nameless 9 and a co-ed group, 88 Shy, during their Hatboro-Horsham days. To round out Coastal Vibes, Harrell sought out Farrell, a University of Maryland student, through social media.

“Sometimes you have to recruit people by creeping them on Facebook,” Harrell said with a laugh. 

Besides bolstering its shore gigs, Coastal Vibes plans to record a five-song EP of covers this summer.

At the group’s meeting with Patch, its plans, in fact, far outpaced the singers’ time together as a group.

“We met two weeks ago,” Channing said, adding that rigorous, six-hour daily rehearsals prepared the singers for crooning at the shore. “We’re passionate about music.” 

The group infused a bit of that passion into the Keith Valley seventh- and eighth-grade music program at the tail end of the school year. Keith Valley music teacher Mindy Rubinlicht, who had just begun her career at the school when Harrell, Brooks and Lovick were eighth-graders, had invited the group back to perform a 30-minute set, and later, to coach the 45 seventh- and eighth-grade boys in the school’s choral program.

“They worked with them on beat-boxing and showing them how they take a song and break it down into smaller parts to make it a cappella, but still sound like a recording,” Rublinlicht said.

With music programs being scaled back because of tight budgets, Channing said it was important for the group to make a push to “save music.”

But, more pressing than that was the need to encourage students – and boys in particular - to pursue singing, he said.

“There’s a big social stigma to music,” said Channing, adding that Coastal Vibes members continued singing beyond middle school because of friends, or older siblings. “A lot of kids quit in middle school.”

For her students “on the fence” about singing at the high school level, Rubinlicht said she thinks the group succeeded in convincing them that “it’s ok to sing and it’s cool to sing and who cares what people think.”

“I’m really proud that they were able to use the skills that they learned in middle school and high school and even college,” Rubinlicht said. “They really learned how to be musicians. It’s impressive.”

For Harrell, the mastermind behind Coastal Vibes, his ultimate goal is to build upon the foundation of the group to make the a cappella group a household name at the Jersey shore.

“I want it to be sustainable,” Harrell said, adding that he envisions the group being featured in vacation brochures as a shore attraction. “It creates more than us just singing together.”

And with new people vacationing every week, if not every day, Harrell likens the group’s venue of choice as a way to reach the masses without traveling.

“There’s a new audience every single week or day,” Harrell said. “It’s just like being on tour, but you don’t actually have to move.”


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