Why Do We Sing?

Why do we sing? As Pharrell Williams says, because we're happy.

That was the pitch for a concert we put on in December 2016 called "Happiness Is the Truth" — our most contemporary set to date at the time, all pop songs with strong positive messages and irresistible melodies: Jason Mraz, Alicia Keys, Sara Bareilles, Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, and Newton's own Rachel Platten, whose parents we wrote a letter inviting to the show.

It was a strange and useful season for us. A chorus that had started out singing Pete Seeger and the Carter Family spent the fall learning songs off the current pop charts, and discovered that they work exactly the same way: a good melody, a line worth meaning, and sixty-five people breathing at the same time.

NewTV filmed that concert and turned it into a half-hour documentary. Watching it back, the thing you notice isn't the singing. It's the faces — the kids in the front row waiting for their song, the adults behind them watching Chris, everybody smiling at slightly different moments.

One of our members, interviewed for an oral history of the chorus a few years later, put the whole thing better than any concert blurb we've ever written:

If you walk in tired, you walk out smiling.

That's why we sing.