Singing with glee

As well as being a member of the choir backing up Dead Man’s Bones in Vancouver last month, Jane Ag­yeman was picked to perform a solo, a cover of Cher’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). Fully aware of who the packed house had paid to see – the band is fronted by Academy Award-nominated actor Ryan Gosling – Agyeman wasn’t expecting much more than a polite response, like at an elementary school concert, she says, when “the crowd claps because it’s mandatory.” So it came as a bit of a shock when the club erupted with applause following her four minutes alone in the spotlight. And the Georgia Straight’s review of the show, while generous to Gosling, credited the Grade 11 student at North Vancouver’s Carson Graham secondary school with having “turned in the night’s most killer performance.”

Being upstaged by a kid from the choir is something Gosling has been setting himself up for this fall. On the band’s self-titled debut, which came out last month, Dead Man’s Bones is joined by the Silverlake Conservatory of Music’s children’s choir. And at every tour stop, the band selected a local chorus, painted the members’ faces like ghosts, and took them on stage as backup. When asked by a journalist from Pitchfork what they hoped to achieve by including the kids, Gosling offered a rambling, but poignant response: “You know when you’re a kid and you get crayons and papers and just draw whatever you want and it’s just a bunch of messy lines, but to you it makes sense, and then they put it on the fridge? From that point on, you’re always trying to get back on the fridge. We wanted to get back to that place before we were trying to make the fridge. We wanted to work with people who hadn’t been affected in that way yet.”

The guys in Dead Man’s Bones aren’t the only ones trying to capture a bit of that magic. Aside, perhaps, from Whoopi Goldberg’s turn in Sister Act, choirs have never been more centre stage in pop culture than they are right now. The soundtrack for Where the Wild Things Are features Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and 16 untrained children’s voices. A Grade 5 chorus at New York City’s PS22 regularly captures the YouTube generation’s attention (12 million views and counting) with covers of modern-day pop songs, and counts Beyoncé, Rihanna and Lady Gaga as fans. The Choir, an award-winning BBC reality show about a choirmaster who tries to turn inexperienced, and often reluctant, students on to song, has proven incredibly popular in the U.K. (TVO is airing all three episodes of season one on Jan. 1). And then, of course, there’s Glee. Fox’s massive hit, about a high school show choir, has 8.6 million tuning in every week. And the show’s chart-topping music—including covers of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ and Beyoncé’s Halo—has sold more than 2.6 million downloads on iTunes. At the risk of being stuffed in a locker for saying it, choirs are, well, cool.

Over the years it’s been common for big-name rock stars—the Rolling Stones (You Can’t Always Get What You Want), Pink Floyd (Another Brick in the Wall) and KISS (Great Expectations)—to borrow the voices of youth. The gimmick was linking children’s innocence with the “evils” of rock ’n’ roll. “Putting a nasty attitude, a tone of malevolence, in the mouths of children has been done a lot,” says Irwin Chusid, a Hoboken, N.J.-based disc jockey and music historian. And many of the choirs were used because they were classically trained.

These days, perfect pitch isn’t necessarily the top priority when a band enlists the services of a kids’ choir for hire. In many cases, the less polished the technique, the better. Gosling, for instance, wasn’t looking for a classical choir vibe at all. “We had to make it sound like we had been dead for a million years so our voices were very scratchy,” says Matthew Tissi, a 14-year-old at the Etobicoke School of the Arts, and a member of the choir that backed Gosling’s band at Toronto’s Opera House last month. Gosling “didn’t want us just standing there with our hands by our side—we were dancing on stage.” While striving for an equally authentic sound, Where the Wild Things Are director Spike Jonze, in a YouTube clip of the recording session, worries that a music teacher is over-warming-up the kids.

This trend is more in tune with the Langley Schools Music Project’s Innocence & Despair, the gravelly 1976-77 recording of more than 100 children singing their hearts out in a school gymnasium in B.C.’s Fraser Valley. Chusid still remembers getting “tingles” the first time he heard the tracks—including covers of David Bowie’s Space Oddity and the Eagles’ Desperado—which were captured on a two-track tape in one take by music teacher Hans Fenger. “The imperfections were beside the point,” says Chusid, who had been sent some of the lost Langley recordings by a listener of his program who had found them in a thrift store. “I like things that have a certain sincerity to it, where it comes from the heart rather than coming from technique. There was something about those recordings that tugged at the heartstrings.”

The album landed on the pop-culture radar in 2001 after Chusid, a self-described “landmark preservationist,” found a label willing to produce it. And since its release, Innocence & Despair has attained cult-like status. Even Bowie acknowledged that Langley brought something fresh to his music. “It legitimized, without the overtones that you’re merely exploiting kids, that if they don’t get the notes right, if the rhythm is a little dodgy, it’s okay,” says Chusid. Spike Jonze shared the album with Karen O during the making of the Wild Things soundtrack in the hopes of inspiring a similar result.

Fenger, now retired and living in China, where he plays in a surf band called the Clamps, says it isn’t easy to produce authenticity. “It’s one thing recording in a school gym,” says Fenger, 61. “It’s quite another dragging kids into a music studio and saying, ‘Okay, be spontaneous.’ ”