SCOTTY HASTING - How Do You Choose - Black River Entertainment

There are so many new songs that continue to flood us day in and day out in the streaming, digital age that it becomes overwhelming to try and find one within the selection pool that resonates with you heart to heart, often resulting in you falling back on your own curated playlists and the standbys that you already know you love and have heard a thousand times over.

However, when a new artist emerges with a noticeable heaviness that’s carried in the edge of their vocals, the expert crafting of a heart-gripping lyric, and inspiration from their own real-life story to fully enhance each word sung, it’s nearly impossible to turn away from your speakers as the song’s honesty engages your attention and pulls you in.

Army Veteran Scotty Hasting has delivered that song in “How Do You Choose.”

The song, co-written by Hasting and Jesse Wayne Taylor, is a memorial dedication to his best friend, Adam Hamilton, who lost his life after an ambush in Afghanistan.

Elevating the struggles of coping with loss from his now perspective 12 years later, Hasting leans the rawness of his vocal against a simple strummed melody to immediately tug heartstrings as he allows the listener to come with him on his first time visit to his best friends tombstone, painting the emotionally anxious scene when he sings of being too scared to get out the car as the memories come racing back, trapped within the understanding, “Damn…it could’ve been me!”

However, where so many others who are battling mental health situations succumb to the ways of the world to help them temporarily cope, Hasting instead turns his hurt vertically to the ultimate healer as he strikes a bold prayer in the chorus that sees him painfully move through every tough question, trying to make the situation make some sense as his guilty conscious holds tightly to him:

“How do you choose who comes back home?

Who goes under an old gravestone?

I’m just asking ‘cause it makes no sense to me

Is it something that takes a little time?

Does it even cross your mind?

Or is this the way it has to be?

Tell me God, did I win or lose?

Why am I here and he’s there with you?

How do you choose?”

With a mission in mind of using transparency through boldly sharing his own story to help those struggling with loss and mental health, Scotty Hasting challenges the strength of our faith through “How Do You Choose” as he helps us find redemption in our hurting by pointing above for hope while providing an understanding shoulder to lean on in the horizontal.

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)

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