Local songwriter, Sonja Garlick, pens coronavirus-inspired song

Making something beautiful out of the coronavirus is exactly what Sonja Garlick did when she sat down and penned a song she titled “Corona Persona”.

“I wrote it a month and a half ago,” she said from her Huntsville home. “It took me about a week and a half to write. I thought the virus would make an interesting song at the time, but I never thought it would go anywhere, that this would all be soon over and gone.”

Little did she envision that eight weeks later there would still not be an end date to the pandemic and her song would be playing on YouTube.

“That is not my voice,” Garlick said of the video that has had more than 260 views on YouTube in three days. Rather, Garlick wrote the lyrics and sent them to Stacy Hogan of A Writers Paradise in Nashville, Tennessee. Hogan then found a singer and put music to the lyrics. “But I own 100 per cent of the copyright of my song.”

This is the third song Garlick has featured on YouTube but said this is the first time she had it produced and published without talking to anyone.

“It was all done online,” she said. “What Stacy did with the lyrics was amazing and he created the video. Stacy is really professional so I let him match the music and the voice. I didn’t even know if it was going to be a male or a female singing.”

A retired local school teacher, Garlick didn’t start writing music until 2006. The first song she wrote was called “Cherished Love” and it was sung by Huntsville’s own and very talented Sherisse Stevens. However, Garlick has been involved with music all her life and is an accomplished piano player. She played the piano in 15 of the local Rotary Club musicals.

“It is a hobby,” she said of her songwriting. “I don’t do it for money, it is just fun to do.”

In fact, Garlick recalls receiving a lot of rejection notices before finally writing “Face The Sun”, a song about overcoming hardship and looking through the clouds and moving on. That song has been viewed more than 206,000 times on YouTube in two years.

Since the pandemic began, Garlick said there have been a lot of songs about the virus released. She has sent her song to TAXI, an independent company that reviews music and helps independent songwriters and artists reach the people their music needs to reach in order to be heard.

Ultimately, Garlick said she would love to hear her song being used in a movie or a TV show about the coronavirus. But regardless, she is proud that she has created something that helps to capture the current situation in the world, and that she has been able to turn something so horrific and deadly into a moving tribute.

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