Call them JP and the Morgans, or Vanguard Halen, or the Salmon Shorts Club. While this a cappella group calls itself the Tonics, they do not mind the jokes. In fact, they are grateful for them.
The Tonics, a Philadelphia-area vocal ensemble founded in 1990 consisting almost entirely of middle-aged men, have gone viral, raking in millions of views and stories in news outlets like NPR and The Philadelphia Inquirer. A typical video consists of the group singing around a kitchen island, with viewer comments like, “When the monthly annuity meeting starts to get a little out of hand,” or “Not a single out-of-date tax return between them.”
“We’re pretty good singers, and they’re pretty good songs, so that’s part of what people enjoy. But what really drove the viral stuff is the comments. They’re so funny, they still make me cry laughing sometimes,” said Philip Pearson, who’s been in The Tonics since about 2000.
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Pearson is sometimes known as the “orange hat guy” online, given his penchant for wearing college baseball hats – one for Princeton University, where he was an undergraduate, and one for the University of Virginia, where he attended medical school.
“I was a trader on Wall Street in the 1990s for one year, and I had an epiphany in the middle of that year. I was like, ‘Holy moly! I think I want to go into medicine.’ So I had to change everything around,” he said.
The problem was Pearson had studied English as an undergraduate and avoided the premedical required courses as best as he could. Luckily enough, his then-girlfriend had been accepted to UVA’s School of Law.
He followed her to Charlottesville and started taking the prerequisites for medical school at UVA. Answering his classmates’ questions was a little awkward – no, he was not in a fraternity, and no, he was not a graduate student – but after getting through those courses, he enrolled at UVA’s School of Medicine, where he said he had “nothing but positive memories.” He made time to sing on occasion, but it was difficult to fit music in between studying and clinical rotations. He returned to the Philadelphia area, where he grew up, for his surgery residency.
According to Pearson, it is common for surgeons to pause their residencies to do research. Research allowed him more free time for a lifelong passion: singing. He sang in his school and church choirs growing up and was part of the Tigertones, an all-male a cappella group at Princeton.
“I knew a lot of singers in the Philadelphia area, so I started sending out emails, asking if there were any grown-up a cappella groups,” Pearson said. “I finally got a very nice email from one of the Tonics, this guy named Jim Buck, who invited me to come by rehearsal. It was a big throwback for me.”
Unlike the nightly, two-hour rehearsals Pearson attended in college, Tonics meetings are a more low-key affair. Members take turns hosting on Thursday nights, and people graze on cheese boards or sip sodas between songs.
A couple of years ago, Youngmoo Kim, the group’s musical director, decided the Tonics should be on Instagram. “So we started an Instagram page, and we had maybe 12 followers,” Pearson said. “Nobody cared. But last year, around the holidays, Youngmoo posted this 45-second clip of us singing, and it just blew up. So the next week, we posted another clip, and it took off from there.”
They filmed themselves singing a Michael Bublé song and posted the video, prompting Bublé to leave a comment. Since then, they have earned international attention, from an appearance on an Australian morning TV show to requests to perform at a London bar.
Pearson and his friends in the group are still wrapping their heads around their newfound internet fame. The group’s friendships and in-person hangouts may be the answer.
