They’re singing with strangers – and stars.
A choir which started with six people in a Brooklyn living room is now such a draw that people have traveled 10,000 miles to sing Fleetwood Mac and Taylor Swift anthems beside undercover supermodels and Broadway’s hottest stars in the basement of a former church.
The Gaia Music Collective welcomes up to 200 strangers — no professional training or auditioning required — to an event space in Bushwick to harmonize impromptu to songs like Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and Rihanna’s “Diamond.”
Supermodel Cara Delevingne carried an alto part — after she signed up under the fake name “June” Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr. led a singalong. And singer Natasha Bedingfield even recruited some musicians to sing on her track “Your Child, My Child” with singer Milck.
“We started with six people in a living room – I got friends that I knew from college acapella or theater who as adults weren’t professional musicians, but just wanted an outlet to sing every once in a while,” Matt Goldstein, a vocal arranger, singer and songwriter who started Gaia in June, 2021, told The Post.
Goldstein and co-creator Hannah Tobias quickly outgrew his living room, then rented the Bushwick event space and started blasting out invites in April 2022.
People sign up for the events, like its one-day choirs, on Gaia’s social channels. From there, Goldstein and the Gaia team pick a popular song, send out recorded harmonies for alto, soprano, tanner and bass parts people can listen to before the day of the event. The cost? A pay-what-you-can sliding price of $11 to $33.
Singers come together like a flash mob and sing for three hours, or even all day.
Now Gaia has 315,000 TikTok followers and had a 300-strong waitlist when they announced plans for the “Landslide” session.
People regularly traveled from New Jersey and Pennsylvania to join in — and flown in from Jamaica, Berlin, Germany and even Australia.
“It’s been a wild ride,” said Goldstein.
Broadway stars Chibueze Ihuoma and Brit West of “Hadestown” dropped in last month for solos with more than 170 people harmonizing.
In February, “Hamilton” star Odom Jr. harmonized a new song surrounded by 200 strangers.
Aaron Lewys, 32, first took part when he saw Gaia on social media in 2022 when he was visiting from Clinton Township, Michigan.
He booked a return trip just to sing Gene Wilder’s “Pure Imagination” then moved to New York last year, partly because of the choir.
“I was like, ‘Oh man, this is everything I love. Why wouldn’t I be a part of this?’” Lewys, of Sunset Park who sings bass, said.
“It was definitely a big factor in me wanting to make New York home.”
Lewys recalled realizing that the alto singer in a bucket hat was Delevingne during a session last June. “It was cool to see her plug in and not make a big scene or want to be recognized,” he said.
“It’s so inspiring to see who shows up. There have been people who work corporate jobs, or science jobs, who say I feel so burnt out I have to remind myself why I love music in the first place.”
