We had the pleasure of interviewing Cody Fry over Zoom video!
When his schedule of dates with fellow musician Ben Rector on the well named Old Friends Acoustic Tour, was canceled after just four shows due to the pandemic, Cody Fry retreated to his Nashville home, took the occasional work-for-hire production job, finished up his album Pictures of Mountains (which came out earlier this year) and monitored his Spotify streams. It was there he began noticing unusual activity on “I Hear a Symphony,” the 14th and final track on his 2017 album Flying, recorded with a full orchestra, its streams climbing incrementally, eventually hitting a peak of 400,000 streams per day on Spotify alone.
Fry is a singer-songwriter-composer-arranger with five albums under his belt, starting with his 2012 debut, audio:cinema–a perfect description of the idiosyncratic, wide-screen, romantic movie-score approach he takes on “I Hear a Symphony” and “Photograph” (from Pictures of Mountains). Going down the internet rabbit hole, he discovered some comments on his YouTube videos that led him to Tik Tok, where “I Hear a Symphony” had been adopted, first by a K-Pop fan community, then by anime aficionados, who used the song in their video montages–more than 45,000 of them, representing millions of streams. Unfortunately, Fry only received a check from TikTok for a grand total of $150 so far for the video usage, but that activity spurred his four-year-old Flying album to garner upwards of 50 million streams and counting.
That has earned Cody the luxury to choose his own creative path, and the result is The Symphony Sessions, a six-song album that includes his patented live orchestral touch, including fully arranged covers of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and Ben Rector’s “Sailboat,” a song from his tour partner’s 2013 album The Walking In-Between, which served as a joined encore on their tour dates, with Fry on piano, Rector on guitar.
All the songs were recorded live in a single day, including several of the lead vocals, with a 60-piece orchestra, including strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion. “When a session is structured in this way, it doesn’t leave much room for error, but luckily the musicians were incredible, and everything turned out better than I could have imagined,” says Cody. “It was a stressful, nerve-wracking, joyful, rewarding experience. I hope I get to continue making more music like this.”
The album also features songs reimagined from Fry’s back catalog like audio: cinema’s “Underground” and “Stop Breathing” (a song he originally recorded as a duet with his now-wife Haley); a new song, “More Than the Day Before” and instrumental interlude, “Caves.” Cody is also posting two live videos of him performing both “I Hear a Symphony” and “Photograph” before a full 60-piece orchestra.
The Symphony Sessions takes pop music to orchestral heights. You don’t need to be a TikTok follower to hear that.
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