Annie Lennox is back with a new theme song for Matthew Heineman’s A Private War.
The singer was tapped to write the theme song to the movie about British journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed in 2012 while covering the war in Syria. Lennox collaborated with the film’s composer, H. Scott Salinas and the result is a moving ballad aptly titled “A Requiem for a Private War.”
The singer-songwriter had actually met the Sunday Times journalist before her death but she wasn’t sure whether she’ll be able to deliver.
“When the call came through to ask me if I would write a song, I said: ‘I’d like to try,’” Lennox said. “Because I hadn’t written a song in years, and I didn’t even know if I could write a song.”
“The first line came to me and the rest quickly flowed,” Lennox told Variety. “I wrote it over a couple of hours and thought: Wow, I must have been meant to write this. It felt so strange like it was meant to be. I was so touched by Marie’s death and in those circumstances you feel so helpless. But writing a song a few years later felt so appropriate to me. I wanted to honor her memory.”
“It truly is a requiem that you sing in honor and in commemoration of death so that we don’t forget — and Marie wrote those stories so that we don’t forget. It’s carrying on that legacy of remembrance,” Lennox continued.
Lennox previously penned the original song “Into the West” for Lord of the Rings and “Love Song for a Vampire” for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. hadn’t lost her touch.
