19 fourth-graders sing backup for Boston’s Fran Cosmo

By JOHN BRIGGS
Observer-Dispatch

MARCY — By the fourth or fifth take, the kids had a lock on it.

They stood in a tight semi-circle in the recording studio, some with a professional-looking hand on their headphones, one or two with arms folded, a couple of them at stiff attention, waiting for their cue.

“I’m excited,” said Brittany Smith, 10, as she waited for the session to start. “I’m going to be on a CD. I’ve never done it before.”

On the other side of the glass, in the control room, Fran Cosmo — the Fran Cosmo of the rock band Boston — wearing granny glasses and a yellow cap, was in his element, as though he’d been directing a choir of 19 fourth-grade girls forever. The girls came from John E. Joy Elementary School in Rome.

“First,” he told them, “we’re gonna get a blend. Let me know if the music if too loud for your voices.”

They nodded.

Out in the hallway, Jean Brazie, whose daughter Betty Jean was recording, said the parents — most of them with video cameras — were more excited than the kids.

“We appreciate Boston,” she said. “That’s our era. We used to cruise around in a car with a tape on.”

The girls were at Cosmo’s studio on Woods Road to sing a short verse: “Show me, hold me, show me, someone, show me the world.”

Their singing emerges from the happy noise of kids on a playground and, swelled through multi-track mixing to sound like 100 voices, will form the background for Utica rapper Chuck Collins telling them to “take advantage of the time we got ... learn to live right together.”

The students were selected after try-outs for sweet voices. The school was chosen because the principal, Robert Evangelist, is the uncle of Sandy Cosmo, Fran’s wife.

“He said he needed kids singing for this record, ‘Show Me the World,’ and he was thinking of going to a Utica school,” Evangelist said. “I said, ‘Hey, what about us?’

“They’re psyched up,” he grinned. “Thrilled.” He was bouncing happily on his toes and beaming at his psyched-up but orderly students and their parents.

Cosmo still tours with Boston as lead singer — a 1995 release sold more than 4 million copies — but “Show Me the World,” he said, will be a release of his new group, Cosmo.

“I have a funny feeling it’s gonna be a big successful song,” he said. “God only knows when it’ll come out, but I’m hoping it’ll land a major record label.”

The song emerged from his feeling of desolation on Sept. 11, as he watched the horror unfolding on TV, his baby daughter on his lap.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said, “Look at the world we have to grow people in.”
The next day, he said, he began writing the song.

“That’s pretty good, isn’t it?” Cosmo said over his shoulder to the parents massed behind him in the control room. It was the third take, and the girls were getting used to singing with the headphones.

“Beautiful,” he said to the girls after the fourth track. “Beautiful.”

Four tracks later, he had enough, and he put them all together, swelling the 19 voices into a huge chorus and blending in the playground noise and the music.

Behind him, misty-eyed parents bit their lips. The girls broke into big grins. It sounded good.

Cosmo began applauding, and the parents joined in.

“You guys sound great!” he told the girls. “Great!”

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