SAL GIVES VOICE TO BOYCE—GAL PAL QUESTIONS CHOICE!
Sal Donato, our resident newsreader-in-song, has begun to collaborate with staff writer Boyce Da
“He’s a good kid,’ Sal said. “A real wordsmith.”
The pair has already written four or five songs about the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting quarantine.
This week, the two join forces for “It’ll Be Me,” a song with an interesting genesis.
“He wrote some lyrics about the quarantine,” Sal said. “They were, to my mind, downbeat. I don’t know what the kid is going through, but I didn’t find the song…what’s the word?…constructive. I reworked it a bit for maximum uplift. That’s what we need at a time like this.”
He sent the revised lyrics back to Day, who did not reply.
“I don’t know if he was offended or maybe sick or if his silence was his way of giving me his blessing,” said Sal. “I’m assuming the last of these. At the same time, Day’s girlfriend, Lucia Carrasco, contacted Weekly World News music editor Frank Lake and requested that Day’s original lyrics be run alongside Sal’s song. “Boyce loves the song,” she said. “He understands the point of hope. But he questions whether there’s not some point to hopelessness as well. I think he would have wanted…I mean, he wanted…his viewpoint to sit alongside that.”Lake replied with several queries about Boyce Day’s condition but Carrasco did not reply.
The mystery deepens.
In the meantime, here are Boyce Day’s original lyrics to this week’s song, “It’ll Be Me.”
IT’LL BE ME
Lyrics by Boyce Day, music by Luciano Salvatore
She fell ill in Siena in the springtime
It was hot outside but hotter in her bones
She fell in the Palazzo Salimbeni
A nearby tourist overheard her moans
I never met her
I have no doubt
And yet she is someone
I’m thinking about
He went biking in Seattle in a rainstorm,
On a day that started off cloudless and clear
He got home and toweled off and started coughing
Seventeen days later, he’s not here
I never met him
I have no doubt
And yet he is someone
I’m thinking about
One day, I see
It’s bound to be me
Taken by illness
Brought down by danger
One day, I see
It’s bound to be me
And I’ll be a stray thought
In the mind of a stranger
He was wrapping up the last verse of his lyrics
Thinking of the best way to rhyme “night”
A heaviness collected in his left lung
And soon crossed fatally into his right
