Songfacts®:

• Annie Lennox wrote this song for the end credits of the movie A Private War, which is based on the life of the late foreign affairs correspondent Marie Colvin. It was the first new song the Eurythmics frontwoman had written since she penned "Universal Child" for her 2010 festive album, A Christmas Cornucopia.
• When director Matthew Heineman asked Annie Lennox to contribute a song to A Private War, she was initially hesitant as she didn't feel she could write anymore. However, Lennox decided she wanted to give it a try and she was pleased with the results.
  
  "Normally I'm really, really critical of my performances or my recordings," she told Entertainment Weekly. "I don't want to be in any way sentimental about any of this, but if Marie were here, I feel that she would feel that this was worthy of her."
• Lennox only got to see A Private War after she wrote the song, but was struck by a strange coincidence. The first word in the beginning of the song is "why" and one of the last things that Marie Colvin says in the movie is "Why? Why?" "It's uncanny," she said.
  
  Perhaps Lennox just likes that word.
• "Requiem for A Private War" has a lot to live up to. The previous end-credits movie song Lennox did was "Into The West" for 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the Kin. She won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for that one.
• The song is the last thing the cinema-goer hears after watching Marie Colvin go to hell and back multiple times throughout the film. Lennox realized that by this stage the viewer is in an emotional place, "feeling raw and gutted" and she wanted to write something to comfort them before they return to the real world. She told Billboard her intention was to "cradle and hold the emotion of the audience as they're preparing to get their coats on, stand up, gather themselves together before they step out into the street."
  
  Lennox added: "That's a beautiful purpose of the song - it gives [people] a moment to reflect on what they've seen."