Amaru,the untouchable musician

By Dennis Asiimwe

Singer-songwriter Amaru dropped Heartbeat, a gentle acoustic ballad, early in June this year. Amaru, whose earlier releases Stay and Dance  My Pain Away have earned her six nominations at the Club Music Awards, is not one to shirk from trying to use di erent approaches to her music.

Heartbeat plays with the whole concept of rhythm because the song is, well, about a heartbeat; the heartbeat of a person in love, who is forced to love from a distance (something along the lines of a longdistance relationship).

The rhythm section is deliberately tremulous, emotive, evocative and her selection of instrumentation (acoustic guitar and ute) gives this song that fragile and gentle sense of longing that works in tandem with this type of lyric. If you want to think of a song written along the same lines, with the same level of potent longing, Get Here by Oleta Adams comes to mind.

Amaru personalises this song, not simply because she sounds like she is singing about something that she was experiencing at the time, but also by using references in the song that place it in a context that make it immediately familiar:

If she could fly like a bird, she would fly very far/till she flew away to him/And if she could run really fast/Run like Stephen Kiprotich/She would sprint away to him...

But what sells this song is the fact that she is giving us a glimpse into what she is feeling. Heartbeat is a personal song, and Amaru has taken a writing credo, one that every successful writer uses, and put it to good use: write what you know.