Singing for Sandy: Bianca Sirgany-Castro collaborated on a son to raise funds for Sandy Hook’s School Support Fund.
Bianca Sirgany-Castro was running on a treadmill at the gym at Miami Dade College when she spotted the news coverage of the school shooting in Newton, Conn.
“They had big monitors [at the Wolfson gym] turned to the news,” Castro said. “I saw that twenty something people had died at an elementary school.”
The next day, the 18-year-old MDC music major received a call from Bryson Zachary, a friend from the high school in Maryland she attended; Zachary, 17, asked her to be part of a song he wrote dedicated to the victims of the shooting.
“He reached out to me about doing vocals for the rap he had written,” Castro said.
Within a few days the song was complete and available to the public for download.
All proceeds collected from song will be donated to the Sandy Hook School Support Fund, a fund created by the Newtown Savings Bank and the United Way of Western Connecticut to provide services to victims’ families and the community
“Newtown (Our Town)” is available for download for $1 at teambrey.bandcamp.com and on iTunes. Any amount of donation will be accepted.
“The words for the song kind of just hit me, and I knew I could give back via music.” Zachary said. “I started it the night before Christmas Eve and finished it Christmas Night.”
After he wrote the song, Zachary, a high school senior who was inspired to write the song by the love he feels for his younger siblings, sent the rap to Castro who recorded her harmonies and vocals over the rap.
“The main lyric I sing is ‘I don’t know where to go from here…Newtown is our town’,” Castro said.
The two musicians are planning to create a music video to accompany the song. Zachary is in the process of creating an idea for a concert. The duo said they want to help the Newtown community, however, they can.
“It didn’t just affect Newton,” Castro said. “It affected the country as a whole.”
