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Several students from the Brookewood School traveled "All the Way Up to Heaven" last month when they became bona fide rock stars, performing onstage at four sold-out concerts with the nationally-known alternative rock band Guster.

The experience took the 14 girls to two sold-out shows at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., and two sold out shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, a 2,600-seat venue that has hosted acts such as the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson. It also took them backstage with a band they all now adore.

"In New York I was just standing back stage and I was just really amazed because I get to meet the band that billions of people know," said Chiara Petruccelli, 13, of Rockville.

Before the concerts, Marta Stohlman, 13, of Kensington had only heard of Guster. But now?

"I love them," Marta said. "I think they're better than U2."

Guster, a pop acoustic band known for quirky stage antics, decided to reprise an old hit for its 10th anniversary tour of its 1999 album "Lost and Gone Forever." The band decided to add a children's choir to the live stage performance of "All the Way Up to Heaven," a falsetto song with whistling parts.

Sean Robinson, a salesman at Chuck Levin's Washington Music Center in Wheaton occasionally helps out with bands performing at the 9:30 Club, and was charged with finding a horn section and a children's choir for the local Guster concerts. The horns were easy, but not the kids.

"I looked around and talked to some of the schools and everybody came up with the same answer," said Robinson of Columbia said. It was no.

So when Anne Marie McMahon, the music teacher at the Brookewood School, an all-girl's school in Kensington, happened into the music store for supplies, Robinson found out she was a choral teacher but nearly got a "no" again.

"What parent is going to say, ‘Yes, have my child sing at a nightclub?'" asked McMahon, of Silver Spring. A few calls revealed the answer: Brookewood parents.

With a week to prepare, the girls learned the whistling, two-part harmony and dance moves for the song using YouTube recordings. Two boys from their partner school the Avalon School also performed at the D.C. concerts.

"I'm just really impressed with how professional they were about it," McMahon said of the children. When the kids took the stage for the first time, they were a hit, and now star in several YouTube videos of their own that popped up after the concerts showing crowds cheering every time the girls, who wore their Brookewood uniforms, sang or whistled.

"The audience was just eating it up, because it was just kind of random and cute," McMahon said.

The girls were also eating it up, including getting premium backstage.

"At the 9:30 Club in the dressing room they gave us like, cupcakes and they gave us a refrigerator with like, a lot of soda in it and gave us dinner," said Cecelia Stohlman, 11, of Kensington.

Allison Bloss, 12, of Clarksburg said that at the first performance she "couldn't stop smiling," a problem during the whistling parts, which she was faking anyway, being unable to whistle.

"I was like, smile-whistling," Allison said. The girls even signed autographs for audience members after their performances, and Robinson got them a poster to sign to give to Guster as a gift.

Seth Loeser, Guster's tour manager, said the girls "blew it out of the water" at the 9:30 Club, prompting the band to invite them to New York for the final two shows of the tour at the Beacon Theatre over the Thanksgiving weekend.

"Their performance was so incredible because they really owned the song and added another dimension which become the most emotional moment of the night for both the band and the audience," Loeser wrote in an e-mail to The Gazette.

At both shows, the girls got the crowd to wave their arms back and forth, but their onstage confidence didn't mean there weren't jitters.

"It was scary, but it was fun," said Meagan Collins, 10, of Silver Spring.

"I think it was more scary back stage than when you were going to get on," said Catherine Sorensen, 11, of North Bethesda.

For the New York shows the girls stayed in hostels and experienced rock ‘n' roll from two vantage points.

"In New York I think it was really cool we performed on the same stage as Michael Jackson," said Sophia Sorensen, 9, of North Bethesda. "Michael Jackson has a music video on that stage. And then at one point these two guys in the audience took their shirts off and were running around and down the aisle!"

But Rachael Agan, 12, of Silver Spring was just pleased with how nice the members of Guster turned out to be in real life.

"Thousands of people like adore them and want to be them, and they were just talking to us like we were old friends," Rachael said.