Windsor band pays tribute to front-line workers through new song

Cheryl Fraser, the lead singer and lyricist of Windsor-based Gritty Angels Band, never expected to receive such an overwhelming response to a song that took her only 20 minutes to write.

She and her bandmates — guitar player Yvan Lichtensteiger, bass player Sid Meloche, drummer John Reginella and producer Jay Sieben — put together the song Strength Behind the Mask, paying tribute to all front-line workers, especially those working in the health-care sector.

"I wrote it specifically to address anybody who was going out, day after day after day, putting their lives on the line to make us have better days. So I decided to initially make the video for our loved ones who are out there, and then I just decided who better to support and pay tribute to than our local health-care workers," Fraser said.

She later took to social media calling for front-line workers to submit a picture of themselves to potentially be included in the montage music video for the song. She said she received about 500 submissions within 27 hours.

"I've cried, I've shook my head in disbelief. I am grateful and humbled and flummoxed. I'm so appreciative of all the support that they are giving us as a group and allowing us to pay tribute to them because they deserve it," she said.

With so many of her family and friends working on the front lines and having listened to so many of their stories at work, the words for the song just flowed out.

"I was sitting outside on my porch and the first phrase that came into my head was 'a year ago, about a year ago,' and that's all it took. 'It was so sad about a year ago, more and more so sick,' and I had those three lines and that dictated the cadence of the rest of the verses for me," Fraser explained.

"It just flew off with my fingers. It was everybody's stories and everybody's feelings and all of my feelings of support and love and tribute that I wanted to give to them."

'We had no expectation of this,' says Fraser

While she had hoped the song would touch a few people, she didn't expect such a big response from the local community.

"All have the four of us, music is not our career, so to speak, all of us have had other occupations and some of us still are working in our fields. Music for us has always been driven out of love and out of passion and out of friendship for each other," Fraser said.

"So the expectation was nothing. We loved our song. We knew it made our hearts feel good to play it. We knew that it would hopefully touch some people and resonate. We had no expectation of this. This has come out of left field," she said. "We are beyond appreciative and humbled."

She said the band plans on assembling the music video with the photos sent to them in the coming days.

"We're just doing it out of love," she said. 

"Our city is known for being givers. So what better time can we illustrate how loving and giving we are than what's been going on in the last year."