Flak Magazine: Review of The Langley Schools Music Project, 02-01-02

The unfortunate tendency to think of songs as windows into the thoughts of songwriters distorts the songs' meanings and blurs the line between art and biography. On its face, The Beach Boys' "In My Room" hits on something basic and powerful, a childish notion of solitude and indulgence. Hear that song and you're 10 years old, you're in your room, blocking out everything else. It's very affecting.

But if you're a fan, or maybe you just happened to catch the Beach Boys "Behind the Music" on VH1, your thoughts will eventually start to drift. You get caught up in the harmonies, and soon you're thinking of Brian Wilson. You see him in his room, in his bathrobe, depressed and probably crazy. As much as we all love the guy, it's an image that really changes the song.

Thankfully, there's a version of "In My Room" on the recent reissue, The Langley Schools Music Project's Innocence and Despair, that restores the song and lets it be heard without any biases or preconceptions about Wilson, psychosis, the 1960s, drugs, rock stars, all of it. The Langley Project is a sort-of best of the '60s and '70s pop compilation, sung by rural Canadian school children. Their treatment of these classic songs is charged with an innocence and enthusiasm that professional musicians seldom can muster. Their recordings are a rare glimpse of the process through which songs become hits, shared property. A musician makes a record and gives it to the people; the Langley Project is a recording of the people giving it back.

The Langley Schools Music Project was recorded in 1976 and 1977 by Hans Fenger and his friend, Greg Finseth, in Langley, British Columbia, where Fenger, a self-described "guitar-strumming hippie," taught music to schoolchildren.

Without a real foundation in elementary music education, and in the days before Raffi, Fenger had to go with what he knew. So he taught his students American and British radio hits on donated instruments. The Langley band, with Fenger on piano and acoustic guitar, was a yard-sale assortment of hand cymbals, a snare drum, a few xylophones, laptop guitar, an electric bass and dozens of 9-to-12-year-olds singing hits by the Beach Boys, the Beatles and David Bowie, among others.

Recorded in the school gym, the Langley Project has an ethereal spookiness about it. Off-time percussion, hesitant vocals and reverb abound. The recordings alternately recall Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and a grade-school chorus recital. Which it basically was. About 300 copies of the Langley Project were pressed with money Fenger collected from his students. They went to the performers' parents and school faculty. Bar/None Records reissued the album late last year, calling it Innocence and Despair.

It could be naïveté that makes the Langley Schools Music Project so affecting. The children's recording of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," for example, transforms the song into a sort of fairy tale, nightmarish and dark. Without Bowie, Ziggy Stardust or the androgyny, Major Tom seems more believable. The song feels like it is literally about an astronaut lost in space, cold and alone, afraid he might die. It's kind of scary.

Bowie would later sing, "We know Major Tom's a junkie." The beauty of the Langley performances is that the kids don't seem to know that at all. Their innocence elevates Bowie's vision and casts Major Tom as the hero.

Even "I'm Into Something Good," by Herman's Hermits, manages to sound genuine here. Sheer enthusiasm nearly compensates for the absurdity of hearing 60 children sing, "I knew this wouldn't be just a one-night stand."

Like kids everywhere, the Langley students are interested mainly in the good parts. Bass lines, chords and complicated melodies are ditched. Only the catchiest snippets of an idea remain. Skeleton arrangements, or what Fenger calls an "organic" approach in the liner notes, allow these songs to move, propelled by his students' excitement and their seemingly subconscious knowledge of how the songs should go. Because Fenger didn't teach traditional music theory, his students were free from mistakes. The kids were even emboldened to play songs that few "grown-up" bands would try, such as "Band on the Run." Does the Langley version sound like Wings? Not by a mile, but somehow it sounds all right.

The Langley Project captures the essence of these songs, and offers a sort of naked rendition of each. They are not re-makes or covers exactly, more like new originals, archetypal versions sung with an unknowingness that defies ownership. They sound different, but the same. It's like seeing your mom with a new haircut.

— Jamie Wilson (jgreerw at hotmail dot com)