West Haven Residents Vying For Grammy Awards

WEST HAVEN, CT — West Haven residents Julie Flanders and Emil Adler are vying for three Grammy Awards with a reimagining of their band’s classic song “Return to Me” with a virtual worldwide choir.

October Project is an American pop rock band that started in the 1990s and currently consists of Flanders, Adler and lead singer Marina Belica, a Kent resident.

Written by Flanders, an award-winning poet/lyricist, and Adler, an Emmy-award winning composer, the song Return to Me is an October Project classic with more than 50 million views on YouTube.

The song was reimagined this year as The Worldwide Choir of Return to Me, a virtual choir single and video featuring 130 performers from 18 countries.

The team won a Telly and Anthem Award for its first virtual choir in 2021, The Virtual Choir of Joy, according to a news release.

Grammy season is officially underway, with the first round of voting extending from Oct. 13 to Oct. 23. Flanders, Adler and Belica garnered three entries in Grammy categories.

“The very things that make a virtual choir special, however, also make it difficult to fit neatly into any one Grammy category,” the news release states. “In particular, the mechanics of a virtual choir (where individual singers record their parts onto a phone and upload them to a video editor and sound engineer who must then synch and mix all the individual performances) are completely different from those of a studio recording or a live recording of a choir that has been singing and rehearsing TOGETHER, in the same room, over time.”

Flanders said, “it’s like trying to fit a tuba into a piccolo case, an opera into a phone booth.”

“There is a category for Best Choral Performance in the Classical Field, but where do you put a choir performance of a POP song?,” Belica said.

The trio, whose previous Virtual Choir of Joy was also in contention for three Grammys and received a Telly and Anthem Award, advocate “strongly for the establishment of a Virtual Choir category,” according to the news release.

While October Project’s Worldwide Choir of Return to Me remains for the time being in a category of its own, voting members of the Recording Academy can find it on the Grammy Awards ballot in the following traditional categories:

October Project Featuring Worldwide Choir:

• Best Pop/Duo Group Performance
• Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella
• Best Music Video

“Produced by October Project and conducted by Ryan Heller, the recording features a vocal arrangement by Keiji Ishiguri and was mixed and mastered by Grammy winners Ed Boyer and Bill Hare,” according to the news release. “Video is edited by Ulrich Vilbois with hand-drawn animation by Phoebe Cavise.”

For more information on October Project and the worldwide choir, visit here.