SOARING ON A SONG: AHS band students enjoy acclaim from collaboration

Published 6:45 am Tuesday, May 22, 2018

A group of Athens High School musicians got the chance of a lifetime when they were invited to jam with Nashville-based psychedelic, gospel-folk band Skyway Man.

It all came about last year when local lawyer Patrick Chesnut attended one of their shows in Nashville. After the performance he approached the band’s lead singer James Wallace, with an outlandish idea: come to Athens and perform with AHS’s marching band at the annual Grease Festival.

“I thought it was a long shot, Wallace said in an email. “But he (Chesnut) was persistent and it seemed worth exploring.”

Wallace spoke to Ryan Nix, the band director and they hit it off, ultimately agreeing to make it happen.

The initial idea was to perform together on the courthouse square at the Grease Festival.

“However, once I realized all the work it would take to pull of the performance, I realized it would be a shame not to document it.”

They brought videographer Joshua Shoemaker on board and they transformed the ides into a “live, one-shot performance piece.”

They chose to record the single “Opportunity/Visions pt. 2” with about 30 members of the AHS band and chorale performers Julia Pitts and Meredith Woodfin in the school’s band room. The single appears on their debut album “Seen Comin’ From a Mighty Eye.”

“It was a stable/comfortable environment and it reminded me of my own band room in high school,” Wallace said.

The frontman spent his high school years in the band where he said he butted heads with his music teachers and eventually grew out of being a “space cadet.”

The fusion between the four-man group, AHS marching band and back-up chorale performers resulted in a folksy piece laced with lyrics about followed dreams and persistent opportunities.

“The experience,” Pitts said, was “pretty crazy” and “stressful, but it helped us all grow as performers.”

The group spent the better part of the day recording and rerecording the live performance, which is now available on music sharing sites like Spotify or for purchase on iTunes and Google Play. The video can be viewed on YouTube.

Wallace said he was impressed by the group’s talent but was even more impressed by their ability to work together as a team.

“It was interesting to watch their enthusiasm grow with their understanding,” Wallace said. “There’s music notated on paper and then there’s actually recognizing how the parts feel in context with the band.”

“I communicate in literal, musical terms, but sometimes the best way to explain the desired sound is with some spacey, curveball metaphor,” he added. “My favorite part was the students faces trying to process some of these. In the end, it would always click with one or two, and then they’d translate it to the others in different ways until they reached an understanding.”

Woodfin and Pitts said the more they worked with SkyWay Man, the more they understood where they were coming from and what was expected of them.

“As the day went on we really got to know them,” Pitts said. “They started opening up to us about their struggles and what they have had to do to get where they are.”

When the video came out, Pitts and Woodfin’s classmates knew about it before they did.

“They kept on coming up to us and telling us how great it was,” Pitts said.

“Meredith finally showed it to me at lunch, it was like ‘Oh my gosh’ this is really exciting,” Pitts said.

“It was funny we started singing our little parts to it, and people started looking at us but we thought ‘we don’t care, we’re in a music video,’” Woodfin added. “It’s pretty cool that we got to be part of something like that.”