If you go see Choir! Choir! Choir! at The Iron Horse next Thursday , January 11 at 7 p.m., there will be artists on the stage — Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman, the founders and directors of the famous Toronto-based vocal collective — but the real entertainment will be you (and your fellow audience members).
Goldman and Adilman started Choir! Choir! Choir! in February 2011 as a simple weekly singing project. Popularity made it grow into a twice-weekly event, and now the two friends tour their template around the world: attendees get a lyric sheet for a song, Goldman (with guitar) and Adilman (with animated directing hands) teach the vocal arrangement, everyone sings together and a video is recorded.
“It’s incredibly entertaining, but it’s also just powerful to be able to sing with people,” said Cecilia Moorcroft, a longtime Choir! participant based in Toronto, who started attending the weekly events back in 2012 and can often be seen smiling right in the front row of their many videos. “It’s like being wrapped in a warm hug. Singing was like an essential vitamin that was missing in my life.”
Creative spirit Brian Eno has been championing group singing for years, once telling NPR that he believed “singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor.”
Choir! directors Goldman and Adilman are also believers in the multi-faceted power of singing as a group. At a TED talk, they described some of what the singing collective does as “creating moments and memories through melody.” They’ve made an engaging show out of group learning and enthusiastic singing and taken it on the road.
“It works anywhere where people are willing to show up and open their mouths and make some noise,” Moorcroft said, adding that it’s magical to see and hear the song come together.
“There’s something about the work of it. Starting off, at first nobody’s getting it, and then the thing slowly comes together. The end product is quite beautiful … that a group of untrained people can come together and make beautiful music is pretty amazing.”
Moorcroft has emotional memories from many Choir! get-togethers, but a 2017 highlight was when Los Angeles-based vocalist MILCK brought her song “(I Can’t Keep) Quiet” — which went viral at the Women’s March on Washington — to Toronto for an event with Goldman and Adilman and an expanded Choir of 1,300 singers.
“To be in this room of women and men, singing a song about women’s empowerment — when I was there I was bawling, every time I watch the video I start bawling,” Moorcroft said. “Singing in moments of sadness or crisis, it allows me to open the parts of myself that I often keep closed, because either life is too painful, or the world is too painful. And to do it in a place where you’re not alone, there’s something really powerful about that.”
“And it can also just be, like, silly fun,” she added. “One thing that I really appreciate about Choir! is the range … the laughter and the tears.”
Since its earliest days, Choir! has learned and sung almost 400 songs together (hits by everyone from Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys to Whitney Houston and U2 to Taylor Swift and Daft Punk) and performed with such artists as Patti Smith, Tegan and Sara, Colin Hay and Rufus Wainwright.
Moorcroft, speaking from experience, shared what concertgoers — aka participants — can expect from the Choir! show, besides some irreverent humor from the directors: “An incredible arrangement of a song that you may never have heard of, or that you already love. Fun, laughter, community, warmth, a good song and a good time.”