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.

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