Sal Donato, our resident musical savant, took a summer vacation.
He decided to spend a week at the upstate lake house of Boyce Day, a longtime Weekly World News reporter and also a prolific lyricist.
For the last few months, Boyce and Sal have been collaborating on a series of songs inspired by the COVID pandemic. They have begun plans to collect them in album form. (Tentative title for the project: Quarantine-Age Wasteland. Actual title: Remains to be seen.)
Over the months, they have occasionally had what used to be termed “creative differences,” with Day’s increasingly bleak lyrics bumping up against Donato’s cheery melodies and insistence on illuminating a lamp of optimism at the end of every dark corridor.
DONATO MAKES A DISCOVERY
Last week. Sal went to Boyce’s house. Sal went alone, assuming it would be a business trip. His longtime partner, the noted aerialist Anna-Lisa Rendone, stayed behind.
Boyce must have thought differently. When Sal arrived, he found that Boyce had scheduled not one but two rendezvouses, and intended on conducting them simultaneously.
While Boyce went off with Caaey and Riley, Sal stayed in the cavernous kitchen and made himself a risotto. When he was done eating, he began to page through notebooks that Boyce had left behind, and that’s where he discovered these lyrics.
The song was written before Boyce returned with his two “friends” (Sal said this in front of them, coughing conspicuously as he did, wondering when exactly he had become such a prude: after all, hadn’t he and Anna-Lisa driven down the coast once and picked up a young Swedish couple for a rather adventurous weekend that included a cat o’ nine tails and livestock tranquilizers?).
“I hope it gives everyone a little bit of peace,” Sal said.
“I’m dehydrated,” Boyce said.
His friends laughed.
The Weekly World News is proud to premiere the new Day/Donato composition, “This Is The One.”
