Lauren Upton and Sarah Farid, students at Crown Point Junior Music Academy, recently played bass and guitar and recorded their own song on the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) John Lennon Education Bus when it visited their school earlier this month.
“The song is about pollution and how we have to take care of our world,” Upton said. “We note how it’s our world when we grow up and that we don’t want it to be polluted.”
This was the first time the girls recorded a song.
“They have very good instruments, and they have good technology. And while we’re doing our hard work, they also find some ways to make it fun,” Farid noted.
The school was recently granted NAMM’s Support Music Merit Award for excellence in achievement in music. NAMM holds a competition to reflect that music is part of a school’s education – Crown Point Junior Music Academy made a video about the musicians’ life at school, and the video stood out. The bus, which contains a nonprofit recording studio, travels coast to coast ten months a year, with personnel helping students from elementary through college write songs and create music videos for free.
“We are dedicated to giving them original opportunities and allowing them to express themselves and create. Also they can be a part an environment that is nurturing to the experience of music,” senior producer Ryan L’Esperance explained.
“We are working really hard today to get that whole process done so that we [produce] something that students can call their own, something that they take with them for the rest of their lives and say ‘I created this in one day; imagine what I can create in weeks and months to come.’”
“This is a wonderful opportunity to take all of their music background and put it into one wonderful production,” school principal Muriel Bartolini said of the students.