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- An adult secular choir has become massively popular thanks to its policy of no shaming and letting in everyone who wants to join.
- Landlights Community Choir has two singing seasons a year, with four groups scattered across L.A. County.
- The focus is on popular music performed with a live band, and everyone can have a solo — if they want one.
The emails arrive in people’s inboxes a few times each year with subject lines like: “Want more positivity in your life?” “We all need this right now!” or “Do something for YOU.”
Recipients might be inclined to immediately trash these messages, mistaking them for spam promoting the latest weight-loss drug or advertisements for an upcoming Danube River cruise. But they’re actually heartfelt messages from Greg Delson, a 44-year-old native Angeleno and voice educator who funneled his passion for singing into forming one of the city’s most popular secular adult choirs.
Offering two eight-week seasons a year in the spring and fall, Landlights Community Choir has grown profoundly since its launch in 2019. What started as a single class of 35 people singing pop songs in someone’s living room has expanded into a roster of 260 singers divided among four choir groups across the Greater Los Angeles area — City, South Bay, Valley and Westside L.A. — with a wait list of more than 100 people eagerly counting down the days until the next one. It is not unknown for attendees to commute from as far away as Ventura or Riverside counties to attend their group’s weekly 1-hour-and-45-minute rehearsals. Sessions for each group culminate in a full-production, pop-music-heavy final concert backed by a live band of professional musicians. Although the set list is never revealed before the concerts, the songs for the upcoming spring performances revolve around themes of growth and progress.
A choir that’s about uplifting one another
The secret sauce behind Landlights is its dedication to fun and its approach to rigidity. There are no auditions, and all skill levels are welcome. Attendance is not mandatory, not even for the final concert. Everyone, regardless of talent, can sign up for a solo, and the No. 1 rule sets the tone for the whole experience: “No shaming anyone, ever.”
“My mission is to get the world singing together,” says Delson, who has a master’s degree in music education from Boston University. “My work is to remove the barriers to entry and encourage everyone to sing, regardless of their self-perceived abilities or skill level.”
These sentiments spoke to 23-year-old Marina Fox, and it’s how she found herself standing in front of a crowd of 385 people, reciting the opening line to “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros at Landlights’ fall concert in Koreatown last November.
Fox had been nervous about signing up for a solo, or as Delson calls them, “special moments.” As a recent college graduate holding down her first full-time job, Fox hadn’t been sure she should join an extracurricular group, let alone elect to have a “special moment.” But her fellow City choir members emphatically encouraged her to sign up for a solo, and Fox took the plunge. She’s glad she did.
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An adult secular choir has become massively popular thanks to its policy of no shaming and letting in everyone who wants to join.
“It felt amazing. I don’t do a lot of things in my life that warrant applause,” Fox says. “When you graduate from college, there’s a little bit of a loss of self because the path isn’t set for you anymore. Singing in this choir has given me back so much confidence.”
Dressed in a joyful orange ensemble, Fox was flanked by her fellow choir members, each dressed in a richly hued jewel tone of their choice. As Fox stepped away from the mic, her delight was palpable. Even though it was just a short segment of a hit song from 2009, it felt like a major accomplishment.
“It was almost like crossing the finish line in my postgraduate life,” she says, “because I was finally back to doing something that brought me a ton of joy and excitement, and I had something to show for it.”
Then something surprising happened at the performance. Two singers stepped out of the ranks to recite the closing lines, and one of them ad-libbed an addition.
Turning to the other performer, she dropped down on one knee and said: “Ever since we met, you’ve felt like going home. Baby, will you please marry me?”
The crowd — and the choir — went wild. There was applause, tears, children running amok and flowers being thrown in the air.
Even for Landlights standards, this was a momentous event. At no other time in the six years of Landlights’ history has a marriage proposal happened at a concert — but other magic has brewed, thanks to the group’s unique concoction of support and camaraderie. Romantic matches have been made, singing careers have been started, bands have been formed, podcasts have been launched, health conditions like asthma have been improved and more than a few people have found a part of themselves they’d been missing.
Ron Gould, a 70-year-old creative director who joined the City group last season with his wife, regained a confidence he’d lost at age 12 when his voice cracked during a glee club performance of “Over the Rainbow.”
After years of relying on friendships formed through her husband, 37-year-old Carole Buckner developed a community of her own that has kept her rejoining the choir each season. And Cheryl Hoffman, a retired UCLA radiologist, got back in touch with a creative side of her personality that for decades had remained dormant because of the nature of her work.
“When I see the looks of joy and pride on their faces — that’s my favorite part of this whole thing,” Delson says. “You just see people blossoming right before your eyes. It’s what fuels me to keep doing this.”
Keep it secular and just sing the hits
Although there are a handful of community choirs sprinkled throughout Los Angeles, Landlights is said to be the only continuous group that eschews audition requirements for admission. It’s different in other ways too. The songs performed are popular music, with a few smatterings of classics from the last century, including “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas and the John Denver hit “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
The benefit of focusing on these tunes — aside from their broader appeal compared to, say, chorale music — is that the majority of singers are already familiar with them and don’t need to know how to read sheet music to perform them.
Delson credits his background in community music and the research-based teaching methods he learned at the Complete Vocal Institute in Copenhagen for helping shape the core principles of Landlights.
Delson makes an effort to create a safe space that encourages participants to ask questions, fraternize with others and leave their stress at home. He is a firm believer that anyone can sing; it’s just a matter of providing them the right anatomical training — and making sure they have fun while doing it.
It’s why self-professed “extroverted introvert” Buckner felt comfortable signing up for her first season in the spring of 2022.
“I figured if it sucked I wouldn’t be locked in and could bail at any time. Luckily, I was completely hooked after the first practice,” she says. “It’s a little like summer camp in the way we all come together for a short time and build strong bonds. Honestly, it’s a much better all-around experience than my sixth-grade honor choir was.”
Buckner is a singer in Landlights’ Valley group, marking her seventh season in the choir.
An adult choir with zero pressure
The scheduling flexibility of Landlights has been a strong appeal for Hoffman, who has been in the choir for four seasons and sang her first “special moment” at the City group’s concert last fall.
“I come from a world that’s a lot more structured, so it’s really relaxing and welcoming to see another way of doing things,” she says.
The choir attracts a range of participants across age groups (so long as they’re 18 or older), skill level and background. While some are novice singers and karaoke bar enthusiasts, many come from the entertainment industry, where they work as actors, dancers or fledgling musicians.
To foster community, name tags are worn at every rehearsal, with green stickers used by newcomers and orange ones for returnees. Delson and members agree that it takes the pressure off having to remember names, allowing people to focus on feeling comfortable when they practice the songs.
Learn from a voice expert at a discount
For more than two decades, Delson has worked as a voice coach, but he also has been a songwriter, recording artist, backup singer, producer, vocal arranger and educator.
Another benefit to the choir is that members can learn from him without the substantially heftier prices for his private voice training sessions. Previous eight-week seasons have cost in the ballpark of $350, depending on how early or late one signed up, as discounts are given to those who commit promptly as well as to returning singers. That’s nearly as much as one private lesson with Delson.
“I love having economical ways for people to be able to sing, and in our choir rehearsals, I’m definitely teaching them tricks and skills,” Delson says. “I also make audio files on Dropbox for each of them where I teach them their parts, such as how to get the notes and make the vowels.”
It’s not just what you’re singing but who’s teaching you
The model that Landlights follows wouldn’t be hard for another choir to replicate. Throw together a set list of pop songs, let everyone join, ban people from critiquing themselves and others, and end the season with a big-bang performance. But there’s one key ingredient that would be missing: Delson.
“Greg is a very special human being, and I think without him, you couldn’t necessarily make this happen,” Hoffman says. “He brings people from all walks of life together with his unique perspective and charisma. He really is the glue.”
Gould, who admits he only begrudgingly joined the choir to have a bonding activity with his wife, was similarly impressed.
“Greg’s whole thing is making you feel more than,” Gould says. “He is so courageous with what he does in getting people to loosen up and try these different exercises. There’s a certain level of feeling silly, and he’s able to lead by example and get you in that mode.”
As demand to join the choir has grown, Delson has been working on crafting groups of no more than 65 singers each so that everyone’s voice can be heard while also scaling them so he doesn’t have to turn people away for lack of space. It’s a tricky balance, and it’s why he’s expanded the choir to multiple locations and hired associate conductors, which is something he plans to invest in more heavily for the future.
“I hate telling people no when it comes to people wanting to sing, so it has to grow,” he says. “My task right now is trying to identify the elements that make Landlights what it is, codifying that and teaching it to others.”
But that’s a long-term goal, because at the moment, Delson has bigger things to focus on: namely, the upcoming spring concerts taking place from the end of March through early April in West L.A., Sherman Oaks, El Segundo and Santa Monica.
He’s not worried about how the groups will sound — he knows they will sound phenomenal. Also, he’s not worried about members forgetting their lines or missing their notes. Because in the end, Landlights is about more than just the singing.
“We’ve lost so many of these third spaces that bring people together, and Landlights is an antidote to that,” Delson says. “You don’t see anyone on their phone in rehearsal. Everyone’s just talking and smiling and being present, having fun and just realizing how much they have in common. And to me, that is true community choir. That is what Landlights is about.”
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