Barbershop quartet Timeless, made up of tenor Chase Cullen, lead Andrew Le Foresyth, baritone Mike McCormic Sr. and bass Ben McGowan, won the Evergreen District Champion title the evening of Saturday, Oct. 3. at Boise State University.
“One of my friends told me a long time ago that out of all the acapellas out there, barbershop is the hardest,” Cullen said.
Barbershop quartet music is a distinct style of four-part harmony acapella singing that originated in the United States in the 1900s and is characterized by the usage of music chords such as the dominant seventh chord, and the music theory practice called the circle of fifths.
Due to its smaller presence in modern culture, it’s hard to find people to fill out each part unless you’ve been a part of the society for a while, which was the case for McCormic.
McCormic had competed when he was younger in multiple quartets with his brother, making it as far as fifth on the international stage in a quartet called Flipside in 2006 and 2007.
After reprising his time with the quartet from 2016 to 2018, he stepped back from the society until his son brought him an interesting proposal.
“My son Michael came to me about four years ago and asked if I wanted to get into a quartet with him and asked me who are two of the guys that I would love to sing with?” McCormic said.
The two he chose were Cullen and McGowan, while McCormic and his son took their respective roles of singing baritone and lead.
“I’ve been singing Barbershop since I was about 15 years old,” McGowan said, “We won’t talk about how many years that is because it’s over 30, but I’ve been singing in choruses and quartets on and off all over the Pacific Northwest.”
Likewise, Cullen had spent his own fair share of time singing in the community.
“I was part of a barbershop quartet back in 2015 called Fortunate Sons and we did the far western district, that’s Southern California,” Cullen said.
The group rehearsed around the holidays for two years just to sing Christmas songs together, giving themselves the name “Seasonal Commitment.”
“At the same time we discussed whether we should stay together and have fun and sing on shows and possibly compete,” McCormic said.
That question transformed the quartet from Seasonal Commitment into Timeless, and they went on to compete in the district competition for the next three years.
“We competed in 2024 for the first time and really, we were not ready,” McGowan said. “It was ‘let’s just go and see how we do’ and we ended up coming in third place.”
Being their first time out and placing third in the competition, the group felt encouraged to sing at the next district competition and see what they could do.
“We were really excited to keep working with Michael, Mike and Ben, then next year comes along and we’re singing in Canada,” Cullen said. “Mugshot is the quartet that won that year. They took that year easily. They had much tighter harmony, much tighter everything. It was clear they were the winner.”
Timeless went into their third year preparing for the competition when eight weeks out they had a shake up in their roster.
“My son Michael was very committed to his theater company, Columbia Theater Arts Foundation, and he realized that he was too busy,” McCormic said.
Just eight weeks out from the competition, the quartet lost its lead, and the remaining group members started looking to each other, seeing if they could still go forward to districts.
“We were kind of scrambling at the last minute to see if there was any chance we might be able to still pull it off,” McGowan said.
That same night Timeless almost faded out, another quartet in their district named Argonauts had just broken up due to a member’s own scheduling conflicts.
With the opportunity in front of them, Cullen reached out to the lead of Argonauts, Andrew Le Foresyth, asking him if he’d want to join them.
“He said, ‘We’re looking for a replacement. Any chance you would want to sing lead with us?” Le Foresyth said. “I said, ‘you know what? That sounds like a lot of fun.’ Those guys are great singers and I bet it would be cool.”
Over the course of the next eight weeks, the group sang together every Thursday night, learning songs, receiving coaching and working to blend their voices together to get a high quality sound.
“When you change a member of your quartet out at the last minute, there’s just not enough time together to gel and really have it come together,” McGowan said.
Leading into the competition, the quartet learned one of the songs Le Foresyth’s old quartet was going to do, while he learned three of the songs that they had in their own repertoire.
Quartets are only allowed two songs the first night, and if they make it past night one, they get to sing two more.
“The first night we sang an interesting arrangement of New York New York, a sweet ballad, You Keep Coming Back Like a Song,”
McCormic said. “That helped us qualify for the second night which we sang, I’ll Be Satisfied, and then our last song was a song called Company Time, arranged by my nephew-in-law Justin Miller.”
While McCormic Jr. was no longer a member of the quartet, the rest of them carried him into the competition with the final song choice.
“Company Time was written by Michael Jr. and it was our highest scoring song,” Le Foresyth said. “It’s a great song, I had a lot of fun with it.”
With such a shake up having come so close to competition, the group didn’t have high hopes for their placement in the district competition. Since Timeless went later in the evening, they didn’t get to hear many other groups perform.
“I did get to see Remastered’s second set and they were singing beautifully,” Le Foresyth said.
As the scores were tallied, the entire group sat on the edge, waiting to see if their work over the last eight weeks would land them anywhere good.
“When they announced somebody else as second place, I was actually really surprised,” McGowan said. “I thought ‘No way. We’re either fourth or we’re first’, and I was fully prepared for fourth.”
Eventually the moment came when the judges read off the first-place quartet, and Timeless had overcome all the odds and landed the champion title of the Evergreen District.
“When they named Timeless as the champions, I bowed my head and thought of my son,” McCormic said.
Their final song, Company Time, the song from the original lead, the one who originally brought them all together to sing, was the competition favorite and helped them reach their victory.
“I looked at Chase and Andrew, who have never won the district competition before, and I was grateful we could win and that they would experience it,” McCormic said.
Once a quartet wins the district championship, they can’t compete together with more than two people from the same group, meaning the only way for Timeless to keep competing together is to head for the international competition.
“We’ve got some work to do, because with our scores we received, we technically don’t even qualify to go to the international contest yet,” McGowan said.
In addition to their scores needing improvement, Cullen may also have possible conflicts as he goes out to audition for a musical in the coming spring.
“It’s definitely not the end, by no means it’s not the end,” Cullen said. “The coolest part about winning district in the evergreen contest is that there’s a thing called QCED, it’s the Quartet Champions of the Evergreen District.”
Thanks to their victory, the group can join other champions from the district and the country and make more connections to potentially form new quartets.
Additionally, they will be traveling across the district as champions to perform and be ambassadors for the Barbershop Harmony Society in the Pacific Northwest.
“Most people probably haven’t heard what Barbershop is today, they think of the old guys in straw hats and striped vests,” McCormic said. “Our quartet happens to sing a wide variety of genres of acapella music, anywhere from The Beatles to Elvis, to Earth, Wind & Fire, to Michael Bublé.”
Though it takes time to develop skill to win a district title, to the Timeless group, barbershop isn’t all about the competition.
“I would encourage anybody, if you find yourself ever just humming along or singing in your car to your favorite song, you should probably check out a barbershop chorus,” McGowan said. “They’re a blast, you’ll meet tons of great people and I have so many lifelong friendships because of this community. Our world is sometimes a little chaotic and I would say the peace and joy that this hobby brings has really carried me through some tough times in life.”
At the very basics of it, barbershop harmony doesn’t need the straw hats, the stage, the striped vests or the promise of winning a competition.
“It’s four guys coming together in harmony and ringing chords,” Cullen said. “It’s that simple.”
To invite them to sing at an event, you can reach them at mmccormic7@gmail.com.
For more information on what they do next, you can follow them on Facebook at facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558828012566.
Editor’s Note: The writer of this article is related to a member of the quartet.
