Hot Springs choir to perform hit song with Foreigner

When legendary rock band Foreigner takes the stage tonight at Bank OZK Arena to close out The Hot Springs Rally, the Hot Springs World Class High School choir will join in for one of its greatest hits.

The 24 singers will open the concert by singing the national anthem and accompany Foreigner when it performs the iconic hit “I Want to Know What Love Is.”

Choir director Shannon Nash said it was an opportunity she could not pass up for her students.

“Towards the end of the year, the contact person for Foreigner sent an email to all the schools in the city and they said ‘We need a choir to sing with Foreigner. Whoever contacts us first gets a donation,’” she said. “So, I jumped on it. And so we connected that way and we booked at the end of last year for this weekend and they’re making a donation to the choir program.”

The choir program will receive a

$500 donation for the performance.

Students have now become familiar with the number, as they have been rehearsing it since the start of the school year. However, Nash said many choir members were unfamiliar with the song or the band they would be sharing the stage with.

“I told them about the song and who we were invited to sing with, and their first response since they’re an ’80s band was ‘Who?’ And I told them the song and a couple had heard the song, but the majority hadn’t,” she said. “Then I finally said ‘Let me just play the song for you’ and after I played the song and they were like ‘Oh! We know that song!’ They were all excited once they figured out that that’s what the song was.

“They’re very excited. … They’ve got it locked in. They’re ready.”

Zandora Chinwah, a 12th-grader, was one of the few who knew of Foreigner when the performance was announced.

“This opportunity is really crazy that they asked us to do this,” she said. “We do get asked to sing the national anthem a lot of places, but this is really unique because it’s not really a thing that we get asked to do often. Especially with a band of such caliber.

“My parents were really into music and my mom and dad really like rock music. I also watched the musical called ‘Rock of Ages’ that had a pretty good rendition of it so I was familiar with the band and the song for sure.”

Eleventh-graders Nichole Putman and Megan Martin are also excited because they have listened to Foreigner’s repertoire with their parents through the years.

“When I was younger, my dad, this is one of his favorite bands and I’ve been listening to them for years now,” Putman said. “It makes my heart so happy because I know most people don’t get the opportunity or the chance to do something this impactful and it just makes me so proud of all the choir of the band letting us do this with them.”

Martin said it has taken a lot of practice to get the performance just right over the last few weeks.

“We’ve put in quite a bit of work just getting the harmony down,” she said. “Probably the altos and the basses … they have to stay on the melody of it and the sopranos and tenors we have off of the melody. So just getting all the harmony the way Ms. Nash wants it and the way the band wants it, it’s been a little difficult but I think it’s been really easy at the same time.”

Chinwah said she hopes to see the choir program continue to grow after this opportunity.

“I feel like this is a really big step because we’ve been growing,” Chinwah said. “The entire time that Ms. Nash has been here we’ve been building the program back up because it had fallen short. I’ve been here four out of the five years that Ms. Nash has been here and I’ve seen everyone grow to be closer together and vocally as well, we just keep getting better.

“It’s really sad that this is my last year and the last chance I get to see all of these people, but I’m really excited to see all the progress that they’ve made.”