Fry shares, “I’ve always loved this song, but during the pandemic, the refrain of ‘ah, look at all the lonely people’ just kept coming to mind. Creating this arrangement was like musical therapy, especially with the help of nearly 400 of my fans singing in the choir and, of course, a real orchestra.” Listen and watch the score video now. Building on what George Martin accomplished with The Beatles, Fry’s version of “Eleanor Rigby” was inspired by the pandemic, amplifying the original to ecstatic heights, driven by the notion of “all the lonely people,” and the fear and dread of living in a dying town or not fitting in. “It’s almost like a ‘Fantasia’ version of the song, especially the outro, where the melody is trying to find its place in the chord changes, but never really does,” explains Fry. “Things feel a little topsy-turvy, and the tension just keeps ratcheting up. That’s such a rich song. There’s so much going on in it.” When his tour 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 TikTok, 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. “Eleanor Rigby” is the first release off his new project of beautifully interpreted songs with a symphony orchestra. 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 Fry. “It was a stressful, nerve-wracking, joyful, rewarding experience. I hope I get to continue making more music like this.” Next, do people who are tone-deaf hear music differently?
