A brand new choir has been making waves online this year as the New York Vocal Collective’s pop covers go viral, turning viewers into emotional wrecks as they reinvent classic songs with an enchanting, spiritual twist.
The choir only uploaded their cover of The Beatles’ “Blackbird” in mid-June this year, yet it’s already racked up more than 512,000 views, earning more than 1,500 comments from spellbound fans. Music Man readers can watch the choir’s rendition unfold in the video below…
Singing completely a cappella, the mixed age, race, and gender group transform The Beatles’ ballad into a cinematic experience with a church-like twist. Fifty unique voices blend in soul-moving harmony, each ribbon of melody weaving into ambient chords as each singer becomes a part of this living, breathing, fifty-person instrument.
Soft-spoken female singers lead The Beatles’ original lyrics while their bandmates layer their voices like waves with every other line. Slow and with no stable sense of rhythm, the airy space haunting this rendition allows the choir to discover breathtaking new harmonies hidden within “Blackbird,” some with a mesmerizing dark edge, others charged by an immersive gospel/soul mood.
As they near the end of their cover, the New York Vocal Collective deviates into the experimental side of choir arrangements, singing full-voice and momentarily sliding into dissonance and artful cacophony in a show-stopping moment as they lace hints of jazz into their piece.
And as viewers stumble across this viral clip, they’re being transformed into instant fans. After one commenter wrote to the tune of 1,700 likes, “Sometimes I lose hope for humanity. Then some humans get together and make something like this… and I’m back in,” another tapped into what makes this choir’s performance so instinctively heartwarming, noting, “Beatles songs will be sung for many hundreds of years.”
Countless fans are praying that Paul McCartney hears the New York Vocal Collective’s rendition, with one viewer pinpointing exactly what makes this rendition stand out: “That huge gliss into the electrically dissonant chord was ethereal beyond any experience I’ve had. The way the choir just hits it without having to suddenly adjust to the pitch from the gliss? Unbelievable.”
From the genius of Ben Bram’s arrangement to the glorious voices, the dissonance, the swell, the emotion of the piece, and the sun-bright rewards of humans acting in seamless unity, one thought remains clear amongst viewers: “If this doesn’t make you weep you have no heart.”