Lifestyle
Shaky voice? There’s no shame at this no-audition choir that's teaching Angelenos to sing
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.
Voice educator Greg Delson, center, starts every choir rehearsal with an icebreaker to help the singers loosen up and get centered.
(William Liang / For The Times)
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.”
Two-time returnee Marina Fox joins in song during a rehearsal for the City group’s spring 2025 season.
(William Liang / For The Times)
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.
Delson selects popular songs from artists and groups such as Adele and ABBA that most choir members will already know the words to.
(Sebastian Garcia)
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.”
Greg Delson, center, has steadily grown the Landlights Community Choir since its inception in 2019.
(William Liang / For The Times)
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.
Carole Buckner hadn’t sung in public since sixth-grade choir class but has enjoyed participating in Landlights Community Choir so much that she’s joined for the last seven seasons.
(William Liang / For The Times)
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.
In the greenroom shortly before the start of the City group’s fall 2024 concert, emotions ran high as Delson gave a pep talk.
(Cynthia Garcia)
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.”
At the City group’s fall 2024 concert, a record number of members signed up to perform a solo or, as Delson calls them, “special moments.”
(Sebastian Garcia)
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.”
Misty Gonzales has been tending bar at T.J. Byrnes, an Irish pub in the Financial District of Manhattan, for 13 years. For most of that time, she has served office workers, college students and city employees.
Two years ago, she noticed some unfamiliar faces. This new crowd was younger and usually stopped in for poetry readings, book-club gatherings and parties. Aside from their age, their drink orders set them apart.
“Martinis are the biggest thing — I couldn’t even get over how many people are drinking martinis,” Ms. Gonzales said. “Lots of Negronis, too.”
In the past year, the pub has hosted talks led by the art critic Dean Kissick, a holiday party for the leftist publication Dissent, a monthly reading series called Patio, a performance-art karaoke competition and a pre-Valentine’s Day party for single readers of Emily Sundberg’s Substack newsletter Feed Me.
Some of Ms. Sundberg’s 180 guests were initially confused by the choice of location.
“This was the first time people have texted me before being like, ‘What is this place?’” said Ms. Sundberg, 30, who first went to the bar for a friend’s birthday a couple years ago.
“I wouldn’t go as far as to call it the new Clandestino,” she added, referring to the downtown bar that is often bursting at the seams along Canal Street. “But if you have brand events — magazine parties, readings — it’s become a venue.”
At first glance, T.J. Byrnes might seem like an unlikely draw for writers, artists and fashion types. The bar is nestled in an austere plaza behind a Key Foods grocery store, at the base of a 27-story residential building. The facade looks onto a courtyard it shares with a preschool and a diner. The interior is unassuming, with a dark wooden bar in the front and white tablecloths and red leather booths in the back.
The bar’s eponymous owner, Thomas Byrne, 70, can be found most evenings at a cluttered desk just inside the dining room or perched at a hightop near the entrance, keeping an eye on the scene. In a pinch, he pulls pints behind the bar.
“I am very hands-on,” said Mr. Byrne, who has a neat mustache and typically wears a button-down shirt tucked into black trousers. He commutes into the city daily from Yonkers, where he has lived for the last 32 years. “I’m not saying I never take a day off, but I’m here a lot of the time, and I like that.”
The youngest of three, Mr. Byrne immigrated from County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1972 to join his brothers in New York, where they made their livings working in bars. With his brother Seamus, he ran a pub on Fordham Road in the Bronx from 1975 to 1991.
After they closed that spot, his brother Denis came across a vacant Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street. It needed some serious remodeling, but its sheer size and proximity to some of Manhattan’s busiest office buildings made it too good to pass up. After months of construction, T.J. Byrnes opened its doors in October 1995.
With the exception of a brief window during the city’s Covid lockdowns, the pub has been open nearly every day for the last 30 years.
“People say, ‘Oh, you’re still here,’” Mr. Byrne said. “We went through Sept. 11, we went through Sandy, the big storm and all that, and tough times. But you just hang in there, and it works out.”
Mr. Byrne recalled finally getting through police barricades the day after the attacks on the twin towers to find the bar, helmed by his brother, teeming with people from the neighborhood.
“So many people came in here just to be together,” he said. “People were in distress, and this was a meeting place to sit down and talk.”
T.J. Byrnes has always had an eclectic clientele, he said. City workers from 100 Gold St. mingled with musical theater students from Pace University. Office employees, retirees from St. Margaret’s House apartment community and residents of Southbridge Towers sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar. But it seemed to take a specific confluence of events to get a more artsy crowd in the door.
It might have started in 2022, when the writer Ezra Marcus sang the bar’s praises in the Perfectly Imperfect recommendation newsletter. “Byrnes is a holdout against the mass extinction of normal places for normal people to get a drink in the city,” Mr. Marcus, an occasional contributor to The New York Times, wrote.
A couple months later, Joshua Citarella, an artist in New York who researches online subcultures, called T.J. Byrnes the “new Forlini’s” in an article for Artnet, likening it to the red-sauce restaurant that had unexpectedly become a downtown cool-kid haunt in the years before it shuttered.
At the same time, the micro-neighborhood a few blocks from Forlini’s known as Dimes Square was becoming overexposed and — with the arrival of an opulent boutique hotel and fine dining establishments — a bit too upscale for some.
“It just has a better vibe,” Mr. Citarella said on a recent evening at T.J. Byrnes, where he was hosting a reading group with the author Mike Pepi. “With the transformation of downtown New York, everything has turned into condos; it doesn’t feel like anything is authentic or is here to stay.”
The South Street Seaport area that surrounds T.J. Byrnes has undergone its own changes. Once a gritty neighborhood celebrated by the writer Joseph Mitchell for its fish markets, the district has been transformed over the decades, most recently by large real estate investments, new shopping destinations and independent art galleries like Dunkunsthalle, located in an old Dunkin’ Donuts on Fulton Street.
When McNally Jackson Books opened its Seaport location in 2019, making it a hub for literary events, T.J. Byrnes became a favorite post-reading spot.
Jeremy Gordon, a senior editor at The Atlantic, was introduced to the bar after one of those McNally Jackson events. He took to it right away. Although T.J. Byrnes is unusually spacious for the city — another point in its favor — he described it as “beautifully cozy.”
When his debut novel, “See Friendship,” was published this month, he decided to throw a book party there.
With a lineup of readers and an open bar, Mr. Gordon invited around 60 of his friends to fete his book. The crowd sipped vodka sodas and hung out in the “many little pockets” of the space, which includes a large dining room and a side area that’s more tucked away.
“It is the type of place that I hope continues to exist for as long as I live in the city,” he said.
For some, it is a necessary counterbalance to fussy bars and restaurants that cater to the TikTok crowd or to those seeking experiences behind red ropes.
“I don’t want a concept,” said Alex Hartman, who runs the satirical meme account “Nolita Dirtbag,” railing against what he sees as a trend of bars spending exorbitantly on interior design that panders to the downtown creative class. People are “protesting this sort of aesthetic lifestyle,” he added.
With reasonably priced bars in short supply and a surge of private clubs taking over nightlife, T.J. Byrnes, with its lack of pretense, is an antidote.
“It’s the anti-members club,” Ms. Sundberg said. “There’s this huge cohort of New York City who wants to get into this locked, password protected, paywall door — and then T.J. Byrnes is right there.”
Mr. Byrne keeps track of his bar’s events and parties by hand, in a hardcover planner. Many people looking to entertain there simply text him to reserve the space — no fee or bar minimum required.
“I like the people that come here for the artist group,” Mr. Byrne said. “They’re really nice to deal with and enjoy the place, and we enjoy having them here.” During readings, he often listens from a spot toward the back.
On a recent Friday night, the furniture designer Mike Ruiz Serra celebrated his 28th birthday at T.J. Byrnes with about 100 friends. His guests downed pints of Guinness, sipped martinis and Negronis, and ordered classic bar fare like mozzarella sticks.
Away from the party, Andy Velez was closing his tab. Mr. Velez, who works for the City of New York in data communications, has been coming to T.J. Byrnes after work for 17 years, usually a few times a week.
“This is my ‘Cheers,’” he said.
Even when the crowd started to swell, as it was then, Mr. Velez said that the bar was almost never too loud to have a conversation.
“This is a very special place, a staple of the community,” he said. “Only people in the neighborhood really know about this.”
Lifestyle
Alleged 'Scream' Gangbang Teacher Ordered to Stay Away From Alleged Victims, New Bikini Pics
Alleged ‘Gangbang’ Teacher
Ordered To Stay Away From Alleged Victims …
See Her Bikini Pics
Published
Brittany Fortinberry — the Indiana teacher charged with sexually abusing children by allegedly asking them to gangbang her while wearing “Scream” masks — has been ordered to stay the hell away from the alleged victims in her case.
According to new legal docs, obtained by TMZ, Fortinberry’s prohibited from having direct or indirect contact with one of the underage boys involved in the case and she can’t go to his house, school or work. If she sees him in public, she has been ordered to stay at least 1,000 feet away.
Prosecutors say the court also issued an order prohibiting Brittany “from having any direct, or indirect, contact with our victims.”
What’s more, Fortinberry can’t have any guns, weapons or ammunition in her possession.
Also in the docs, police say one of Fortinberry’s alleged victims told cops she had a drawer full of sex toys … including dildos of all shapes and sizes.
Police also say the student told them it looked like Brittany had a stripper pole in the middle of the bedroom where she would allegedly molest her victims.
Brittany’s posed for a couple different mug shots since her arrest, but we obtained a bunch of salacious photos she posted on social media before her bust.
Cops say she would communicate with the students on Snapchat … sending them nudes and other suggestive photos and sexual requests.
Brittany is still incarcerated at the Morgan County Jail.
We reached out to Brittany’s attorney, who declined to comment.
The sisters Rebecca Meskel, left, and Matilda Meskel laughed after I pointed out that they were both wearing vibrantly colored shoes when we met outside The Broken Arm, a clothing store in Paris, on a Saturday in February. As Matilda explained, it’s not everyday that either of them wears bright, poppy shoes. “It was a random choice and then we realized they looked like ketchup and mustard,” she said.
The sisters said they are from London and that Rebecca, 24, is studying law, while Matilda, 18, is studying fine art. They were having an afternoon coffee and tea and said they had plans to see “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic, later that day.
Along with her tomato red ballet flats, Matilda was wearing a coat that belonged to their grandfather, a skirt that belonged to their grandmother and a sweater that belonged to their mother. Describing their style philosophies, Rebecca said hers was functional and that “Matilda is much more creative than me because she’s in the art field.”
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