At Karaoke Storytellers, there’s a story behind every song — belt it out, bare your soul, maybe find redemption
David Woulard stepped onto the stage at Schubas wearing a black beret and camouflage jacket.
“In 2008 I joined the military,” he told an audience of almost 90 people.
After his first deployment, Woulard needed to find coping mechanisms, he said. One night, he was walking past a bar near Chicago’s Union Station and realized karaoke was going on. He decided to go inside and sing.
“I sang this song called ‘Breakeven’ by The Script was the first song I ever sang,” Woulard said. “And I really feel like I got something off my chest.”
After sharing his story about how karaoke has become a healing factor for him and has led him through some adventures in life, Woulard prepared to do what he does best.
“What I learned from all of those experiences is that you can have all that you want in the world but never be what you want to be,” he told the crowd at Schubas on a Sunday in April. “There’s some people that have all the soul but they ain’t a soldier.”
Woulard stomped his foot, played air guitar and at one point dropped to his knees as he sang “All These Things I’ve Done” by The Killers, rarely paying attention to the lyrics on the screen.
The crowd stood and cheered him on as he passionately sang, “I got a soul, but I’m not a soldier.”
His performance was one of seven that night at Karaoke Storytellers’ 38th show. The show is a combination of storytelling and karaoke, where performers tell a story tied to a song then sing the related song.
Connor Gorman started Karaoke Storytellers in 2018, with weekly shows at the time at Improv Olympic, or iO, a venue that has since closed.
The show has gone through many changes, , including less-frequent iterations, a headliner for each show, and a couple of venue changes from iO to the Anthaneum, finally landing at Schubas Tavern in Lakeview just before the pandemic.
After some initial burnout and sometimes very small audiences, followed by the pandemic that canceled and postponed shows for almost two years, Gorman is finally seeing his vision through.
“Karaoke Storytellers has been a grind for much of its history,” Gorman said. “I’ve always felt like it wasn’t necessarily getting the opportunity it deserves.”
Gorman remembers a few shows where only a handful of people showed up. But he focused on that small group’s reaction to the performances, which kept him going week after week, he said.
“The whole show I wouldn’t focus on 176 empty seats. I would look at the four people sitting there and look at their faces, watching people do the show,” Gorman said. “There is nothing quite like seeing someone engaged in watching someone else tell their story. Those two things seeing how the performers absorbed that level of performance and seeing how the audience responded to it was the thing that was just kind of like, well, this is beyond me.”
Sunday headliner will share story of Chicago Juneteenth history
Chicago’s urban historian, Shermann “Dilla” Thomas, will headline the 39th show this Sunday.
Thomas became TikTok famous in 2021 by sharing videos about Chicago’s history on the social media platform and now leads history tours in South and West side neighborhoods, sharing lesser-known facts about city history and its role to U.S. History.
On Sunday, he’ll be sharing a story about Chicago’s contribution to the emancipation and to Juneteenth, he said.
“When we think about Black folks in Chicago, we commonly think that, you know, they all came from Mississippi or Alabama and they don’t get here until mid-World War I, maybe World War II and forward. But Chicago as a city gets here like 1837 and by 1850 there was some really cool Black people here doing some cool stuff.,” Thomas said. “And they also help with abolition and other things which led the way to the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth. So I’m going to be just discussing them.”
Juneteenth is new to a lot of Americans, and it shouldn’t be a holiday that only Black people celebrate, Thomas said. Participating in diverse and positive events, such as Karaoke Storytellers, is his way of celebrating the holiday with a wider range of people.
Thomas joked he was “sort of ashamed” he hadn’t heard of Karaoke Storytellers until now.
“I fancy myself as someone who knows what’s cool in Chicago,” he said. “So I was just happy to, one, be informed about it and two, to definitely be involved. I just thought it was a really impactful idea, and creative.”
While Thomas is used to public speaking, whether he’s standing on a tour bus sharing Bronzeville’s history, on a stage as a guest speaker on a TV show, he’s never sang in public.
“My wife’s always trying to get me to like, do karaoke and I have not, no,” Thomas said.
An ‘authentic, beautiful experience every time’
Many of the performers at Karaoke Storytellers have either gotten comfortable with karaoke or with public speaking or storytelling, but rarely both, said Jacoby Cochran, host of the show.
“With Karaoke Storytellers, almost always the person is one foot in one of those worlds and one foot out the other,” Cochran said. “So you really get this authentic, beautiful experience every time.”
When Cochran was first invited on the show as a performer, he didn’t expect to react the way he did while singing. Cochran is a public speaking coach and hosts the daily podcast City Cast Chicago.
He thought his involvement with the show would be a one-off event and he has always been confident in his ability to command a stage with his storytelling and public speaking.
His first show at the end of 2018, he told a story about his grandmother, with whom he was really close, who had died a couple years prior. After his story, Jamie Foxx’s “Wish You Were Here” queued up on the screen.
“So I tell the entire story. It goes well, and I go to sing the song and I just immediately start bawling,” Cochran said. “And I basically cry my way through the entire song.”
At the time, Cochran was hosting a storytelling show at The Moth, and Gorman had gone to a couple of shows an watched how Cochran brought a unique energy and commanded attention while hosting.
So when the Karaoke Storytellers host told Gorman he didn’t feel like the right person for the role, Gorman asked Cochran to host.
Cochran said there was something about his feeling anxious and nervous while singing on stage that led him to agree to host the show, and watch other performers tell their stories.
“You get this feeling almost every show of watching somebody go that extra step on stage to express themselves and to be vulnerable,” Cochran said.
‘The sound of the audience leaning in’
The idea for Karaoke Storytellers started in 2016, but it would take several years to shape it into the show it has become.
Gorman wanted to create an improvisation show, but wasn’t sure how to combine his love for filmmaking and comedy.
During a friend’s going away party at Brando’s Speakeasy, in the karaoke lounge, Gorman noticed a bartender doing a mic check as he got ready to sing.
“It was one of those timeless moments where it’s just like, ‘What if someone took karaoke as seriously as I did comedy and filmmaking?’ And that was kind of the origin of the character Franny Giroux,” Gorman said.
Franny Giroux is a character Gorman plays when he performs at Karaoke Storytellers. The character was one of three improvised characters featured in a web series he created in 2016, “The Art of Karaoke.”
Two other comedians created the other two characters — Ruby Space was played by Susan Messing and Chet Mathieus was played by Rory Scobel.
The web series gave way to a larger idea, a film also titled “The Art of Karaoke.” Karaoke Storytellers was born out of the film. While Gorman figures out how to pay for the music rights required to produce a karaoke film, he continues to record footage.
Karaoke Storytellers performers are always recorded with their consent. Gorman also makes sure performers are aware that he and sometimes others are performing a character and telling stories as those characters.
Franny Giroux, played by Gorman, performs at every show. And while the stories are made up as part of the history of Franny’s character, Gorman said his personal story often relates to the heart of Franny’s stories.
As Gorman created Franny’s character, he would sit at Brando’s watching karaoke performers and taking notes. Woulard, noticed Gorman’s people watching and one night decided to approach him and ask what he was doing.
Gorman shared with Woulard his idea for the film and eventually “unmasked” telling Woulard he was in character as Franny at the moment. Woulard shared his relationship with karaoke and told Gorman about a road trip he’d taken to the south, down to Florida, where he stopped at several karaoke bars to sing along the way.
Gorman realized David was the person he was imagining when he thought of Franny’s character, someone who takes karaoke seriously and has found healing in singing. He invited Woulard to be part of the film that night.
“Karaoke storytellers was made for David and people like David,” Gorman said.
In the April show, Woulard raised his hand to be an audience volunteer after seeing that no one else was interested. It was his fourth performance on the show, his first as an audience member.
Woulard is the lead singer in a band, Attack the Sound, and recently completed the Chicago Fire Academy and is a firefighter stationed in Mount Greenwood, he said.
The story he shared in April was for the most part the story he shared with Gorman the night he met him, about his karaoke road trip tour and about how karaoke has become his coping mechanism after he served 12 years in the military and was deployed twice.
Over the years, Woulard and Gorman have become good friends, and Woulard has advised Gorman on the film and show along the way. When Woulard saw Gorman burned out and struggling to fill seats for the show, he told him to scale back its frequency.
Karaoke Storytellers is now held every couple of months with seven performers total, including Franny Giroux, a lineup of five people including a headliner and an audience participant, who is often watching the show for the first time.
Gorman said he always makes sure there’s diversity in his lineup, people with different perspectives that will add to the quality of the show.
Gorman hopes the show helps people gain a better understanding of other people. In his many years of performing, he said he’s learned to appreciate the silence.
“That absolute silence that you hear during a performance, specifically, the storytelling side of it. That’s the sound of the audience leaning in,” Gorman said. “And that’s the thing that just sends full body chills when a performer is up there and just really bearing a part of their soul. Looking at the audience and just seeing every person in that room with them. That’s, I think, one of the most powerful things that I’ve witnessed over the course of the show’s history.”
