In 2012 Queensland singer-songwriter Amanda Heartsong was a serving member of the Royal Australian Air Force, serving in Afghanistan. A year later the post-traumatic stress she endured due to her active service led to her to attempt to take her own life. These experiences – her service and what it did to her – are the foundation of her single ‘The War Song’, taken from her EP By the Hearthfire, which was released earlier this month.
‘The War Song’ was written during an online Country Music Academy Song Camp, during which Heartsong began thinking about how horrible it would have felt for her dad to have to be a pallbearer at her funeral if she had succeeded in taking her own life. In the lyrics Heartsong speaks directly to her father, asking him to be her pallbearer because ‘I can’t come home from the war … The world is tilted sideways and my feet can’t find the floor’.
We have several perspectives of the experience of male military personnel, for good reason: there are far more of them than there are women who serve. Heartsong’s story is valuable for the perspective she brings to accounts of military service but also because it is simultaneously hers alone and one that can be understood by others who have served and struggled in the aftermath. On this Anzac Day, hers is a story worth considering and sharing.
The rest of Heartsong’s EP is worth listening to as well, as she recounts other stories with the warmth and compassion she has, rightly, given her own on ‘The War Song’.
https://www.instagram.com/amandaheartsong | Listen on Apple Music
