Often the most important words of a serious artistic exchange are those at the end.

The parting comments of singer-songwriter Briana Lee, made last Thursday after a morning spent on the Longwood firegrounds, do more than just talk about her latest work.

“I am glad to have gone up there today,” she said.

“It has added a much deeper level of emotion to the song.”

Briana Lee gave this masthead a first, hauling her guitar case across damp ash to perform her song Amber amid the mix of blackened surrounds and new growth of outlying pastures and the epicormic ‘fur’ now hugging burnt tree trunks.

"It is absolutely insane how quickly Mother Nature can turn and regenerate," she said after several long stares across the burnt landscape that climbs up from the untouched green valley behind Maygars Hill.

Lee wrote the song about a week after the bushfire began and from the relative safety of her Kialla home.

However, her family’s close brush with the 2022 floods gave her an understanding of how communities suffer, recover and rebuild after seeing several neighbours lose their homes and move away.

That experience gives Lee the credibility to speak about recovery without pretending she lived through the Longwood fire itself.

"We had flood water up to our thighs at the front of our house and got through that to evacuate," she said.

“Our street was effectively a river.

"Fire is a different sort of natural disaster; it's still devastating, but it has the fear of not being able to get out.

"If you do decide to stay, because you do want to defend your property, well, I can understand why people wanted to stay.”

On recovery after natural disaster, Lee is on point:

"It's those out-of-town communities as well as your internal community that can get together and help out and try to bring some sort of comfort in knowing that other people are thinking of you as well,” she said.

Lee explained that the song personifies the fire as ‘Amber’, a woman whose name echoes the word ‘ember’ and whose destruction ultimately fails against human resilience.

Fittingly, the song's bridge becomes a bridge in another sense, linking the destruction of January with the recovery that continues today:

Life will return, but her memory remains / She can't break the hope that burns inside a man.

Elsewhere, the lyrics can be haunting:

Amber came across a mountain

She was looking for a soul steal

Didn't care at what cost

Didn't care to make a deal.

She was raging and rebellious,

No man could stand a chance.

But they stayed to fight the flames

As she spread fear across their land

Music has been part of Briana Lee's life since she was 13, but after stepping away from recording for several years while raising a family, she returned to songwriting 18 months ago.

Since then, she has written more than 20 songs and recently travelled to Newcastle to record new material with longtime friend and producer Simon Johnson.

"I'm always writing," she said.

"I'd write half an hour every day. It didn't matter if it was good. It didn't have to be good. It was just getting back into a rhythm."

Lee describes her songwriting style as storytelling, a theme she drew upon soon after that January afternoon when she and husband Dean spotted the large white plume rising from the southeast.

“Dean said, ‘That's got to be the Longwood-Ruffy area’,” she said.

A week later, the story of Amber came alive from nothing and is a song that now belongs to a community that would understand its imagery and clever play on words.

"At the heart of it, this is a song about resilience, personal resilience and community resilience and coming together."

Briana Lee will officially launch Amber when she headlines The Winter Sessions at The Vault in Shepparton on 7-8 August.

The performances will feature original material, including the first live airing of Amber.

The single is scheduled for release on major streaming platforms on 21 August.