For KING & COUNTRY‘s latest single, “Unsung Hero,” is on their 2022 album, What Are We Waiting For? But it’s also on the soundtrack of their biopic of the same name, coming out April 26. Turns out the movie and the song happened simultaneously, but they weren’t connected.
For KING & COUNTRY’s Joel Smallbone tells ABC Audio the song started when Joel’s brother and bandmate Luke told him, “I want to write a song about Dad.”
“I said, ‘I don’t. I would like to write a song about Mum, though,'” Joel recalls. “And so we put pen to paper that day on what would become the song ‘Unsung Hero.'”
“Simultaneously, we have this unnamed family biopic … that’s starting to take shape and looks like it’s really going to be built around our mum,” says Joel, who co-wrote, directed and stars in the film. “We literally had this moment where we realized we had a song called ‘Unsung Hero.’ We had a film about our mum. And we married the two of them.”
The Unsung Hero soundtrack, also out April 26, features the duo covering songs they loved as kids, like Seal‘s “Crazy,” Amy Grant‘s “Lead Me On” and Rod Stewart‘s “Rhythm of My Heart,” with special guests.
“It was just so fun to reimagine the songs,” Joel says. “Not easy, mind you. … We spent the better part of a year on it, but we had a blast.”
As for the song “Unsung Hero,” Joel says they had to play it for their mother multiple times before she showed any emotion, much to their frustration.
“She’s just like, ‘Oh, well that’s really nice, isn’t it? Thanks so much for that,'” Joel says. “And we were like, ‘Well, maybe we should listen to it again.'”
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