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When his schedule of dates with fellow musician Ben Rector on the well-named Old Friends Acoustic Tour, was cancelled 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.

That has earned Cody the luxury to choose his own creative path, and the result is The Symphony Sessions, 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 Cody. “It was a stressful, nerve-wracking, joyful, rewarding experience. I hope I get to continue making more music like this.”

The album also features songs reimagined from Fry’s back catalog like audio:cinema’s  “Underground” and “Stop Breathing” (a song he originally recorded as a duet with his now-wife Haley); a new song, “More Than the Day Before” and instrumental interlude, “Caves.” Cody is also posting two live videos of him performing both “I Hear a Symphony” and “Photograph” before a full 60-piece orchestra.

“I’ve run the gamut of emotions, from confusion to thunderstruck excitement to the fear of how long will this last?” admits the Chicago-raised Fry, following in the footsteps of his father, Gary Fry, a successful commercial jingle writer turned symphonic composer who writes for orchestras around the world, and conducts on his son’s two live videos. “This has totally changed my life.  It’s allowed me to say no to things I don’t want to do and be able to pursue what I do.”

Like his dad, Cody has done production music work for television and commercials — including major brands like McDonald’s — but also performed around the world, with the Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands, for Oprah Winfrey on a Mediterranean cruise ship, and even as an American Idol contestant. Although enjoying creative freedom as an artist, Fry also relished the challenge of solving a musical puzzle on assignment. “When you’re given a set of limitations to play within, you have to figure out a way to write something that satisfies all the different demands of the client. That’s fun for me.”

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. The arrangement also includes a nearly 400-person choir made up of Cody’s fans who submitted audio files from all over the world.

“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.”

Although major record labels have come a-calling with his viral success, Cody has decided to remain independent for the time being. “I didn’t feel right about the offers,” he says. “I wanted to see what I could do on my own now that I can support myself this way. Even though record companies can add tremendous value, it was too tantalizing for me to be able to make the music I wanted, without any outside interference.”

The Symphony Sessions is just that, and Cody hopes it can continue to open doors, with visions of taking his orchestral approach to the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall, or even on a tour where he plays with local orchestras at each city, maybe even as an artist-in-residence for a series of shows every year.  For Cody Fry, the sky is the limit, which includes turning youngsters on to orchestral music by showing how it can be as accessible as pop music, that there is a reward to the process.

“I think the most amazing things humans do are the things that we do together in large groups,” he says. “When else in music do you have 60 people in the same room all working together to make the same piece of art simultaneously? There is an energy that only happens in that setting.”

“The kids learning orchestral instruments in school see the orchestras going out of business, they don’t hear any orchestral instruments in the music they actually listen to, and so they just end up thinking to themselves, ‘why am I doing this?’ I want to give those students an answer to that question. And the answer is that their contribution to music is valuable. Not only to keep it alive, but to rebirth it. Using it in a new context that isn’t just to preserve it, but to bring it into a new era. So I hope my work, by bringing orchestral music into the pop realm, will inspire others to do so, and give more and more reasons for those kids to keep learning music.”

The Symphony Sessions takes pop music to orchestral heights. You don’t need to be a TikTok follower to hear that.