The day began as we woke up toddler-less to a wake up call in our Embassy Suites hotel room in Nashville. We were pretty tired since we had arrived pretty late the night before (around 2 am our time), but we didn’t even notice. We hopped up, took our showers, and threw everything but the cultish “all white attire” we were instructed to bring, into our suitcase and headed to Nashville’s famed Music Row for our 10:00am call time at Ben Folds’s private music studio.

We wandered in a modest unmarked door and into a small, dark, cozy and cluttered entry room with personal belongings strewn about on sofas and side tables. A parted curtain at the far side of the room beckoned us. It opened up to a huge space with seven grand pianos laid out in a row against a huge open stairway lined with torches leading to a loft. There was a track set up for a dolly camera and people scurrying around doing important things quickly. We looked at each other and smiled. We were in the right place, and we were EXCITED!

The assistant director, Andrew, got us chairs and we hung out with the other fourteen people, exchanging names, hometowns, and stories of how we all came to be in that room together for this amazing experience. We began wandering around the space, appreciating the many instruments and pictures on the wall (most of which were either photos of Ben’s friends and family or crayon artwork by his boy/girl twins—cool coincidence, huh?) It felt as though we had been invited into Ben’s home, and we definitely had been welcomed into a very personal space. It was a great privilege to have been in a place were such an amazing catalog of music has been composed, recorded and performed.

Then we got down to the business at hand and we were divided into two groups. The people who could play piano were going to be assigned to one of the seven grand pianos in Ben’s “Piano Orchestra” and the rest of us were going to be in the choir. Andy got assigned to a pretty Steinway in the number two spot. He was assigned the base piano part. He was really happy to not only have secured a place of such prominence, but to have a great, animated musical arrangement to perform, taught to him personally by Ben Folds himself.

I got the perfect part for me too! My group was whisked off into the sound booth with Jared (Ben Fold’s bass player and assistant vocal arranger) to learn a very elaborate vocal part. We learned all the words, timing and nuance, but we didn’t actually have to sing, in theory, as long as we looked like we were singing. But, not only were we all actually singing our parts, but, by the end of the day we had each chosen really cool complimentary harmonies. It was such a blast! They had us lined up on the steps of the stairway, so we weren’t in typical “choir formation” which meant better individual visibility. I was right in the middle too. :-)

-Stephanie