Description
Duration:
ca. 2½ minutes
Vocal Range:
B3 – B4
Composer Richard Wilson, who decided to pair New York City’s Century Club poets and composers by drawing the names of the poets out of a hat, wrote me that there was still one name left at the bottom of the hat, and put in the subject of his e-mail “Please Don’t Kill Me!” (I had told him weeks earlier that I had no interest in writing a song to the words of a poet I didn’t choose—the poetry nor the poet.) But all of a sudden in my In box was David Lehman’s “It Could Happen to You” that had just appeared in the December 4, 2017 The New Yorker. I fell in love. After perusing his work I found “February 8” from The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000). A wildly lively correspondence ensued, and we finally met for the first time at the Century on February 8, 2018. This song is dedicated to Russell Merritt, whose birthday just happens to be . . . February 8.
