The songs follow a through narrative and appear in the order below.
Unwritten Song
This song introduces the song cycle and is an outpouring of mid-life grief looking at the end of fertility and the result of systemic sexism on creative women’s careers. I wrote this song with good friend and brilliant Swedish songwriter, Katarina Gunnerholm, some years ago.
For years before this, aside from the Liberty’s Mother project, I had only been professionally writing songs for other people and I had a new idea which I wanted to keep all to myself – the concept of an unwritten song as a metaphor for: the things we wanted to do which we understand that we will never do, as we age. I had tried writing this with a wonderful male writer friend, but the song ideas we had didn’t quite work out .. yet the idea hook and main hook lingered with me wanting to be written.
Sophie says…
When I met with Katarina, I realised I could make myself more vulnerable with her and we agreed to lean into the metaphor of my biggest loss of that kind.. not Liberty herself, but the reality that I would never get to raise a female child. We wrote the song thinking of how it would be if we could never make music again – we used this in turn as a metaphor for what we were really explaining – having to give up your truest dream. Katarina and I have common ground in music, and we were able to share that as a creative concept for writing. I love my sons as fiercely as any mother, but since I was small I wanted to raise, mentor and be more with females .. this song started me thinking about why.
This song is extremely sad – tragic even – I see it as the end of the grief that the first EP represented, and a transition into another grief journey. A journey where I learnt more and more about parenthood, gender and myself.
godsplaining
This song speaks to my new invented term: ‘godsplaining’. Inspired by my experiences of being told by doctors, religious leaders, music journalists and radio presenters (among many), how I should understand and handle the death of my child and then how I should discuss this in the media and indeed every single day of my own life.
Sophie says…
Lia worked with me that day to really unlock my thinking and by sheer coincidence we wrote at the same piano where I had once written ‘I Can Love You From Here’ all those years ago. Lia’s value system around music was inspiring and different to my own. She knew nothing of the ‘rules’ of songcraft which go with professional commercial songwriting and seeing them through her eyes really helped me break into my own internalised sexism around this process and allowed me to write the lyrics which are deliberately anti the commercial music industry, (with lyrics which would often be removed or not allowed in by the gatekeepers). That day I realised that I was a song cycle, that I could scare myself by breaking the music industry rules which I know so well and even taught for many years .. and it suddenly dawned on me that I was writing another Liberty’s Mother record .. like it or not!
In a way, EP1 was all about Liberty herself and was certainly casting me as the strong surviving mother – some version of a ‘good girl’. When I wrote godsplaining, I had just started to understand how angry I was about having to express my grief in a controlled patriarchal environment and it felt unbelievably liberating to break free. I started to think about who Liberty would be today, as a teenager .. and how should would feel about me and my relationship with systemic sexism.
This song will be the only single. All the women involved with the project contribute to the spoken word outro. where we call out, (not with names but by description), the men who have ‘godsplained’ to each of us in our lived experience.
Cycle Breaker
Written with Anjali Perinparaja, this song speaks of raising children whilst handling all the trauma, misogyny, and specifically the indoctrination, within which women of different cultures have been raised. We both identify as cycle breakers in many respects and wrote this song to coach ourselves and share and hopefully motivate our community of women as we progress through this journey.
Sophie says…
I found myself after Liberty’s 10th birthday thinking more and more about Liberty in terms of who and how she would be now. I know she would be as strong willed as the other four members of her nuclear family, and it is obvious she would be a feminist. I have been fascinated by the experiences of my friends from the baby loss community and how we navigate the topic of the gender of our kids. It is definitely different to how mothers who’s children have all survived, think about it. I realised that, despite depending so much of my professional and personal time researching and working towards gender equality, (especially in the music industry where I am a founder board director of The F List and wrote a paper for UK Government on gender equality in songwriting on request from the Women & Equalities commission 2024 report into Misogyny in Music), I always found myself silent when other women with living girls speak about gender. Why should I stay silent because Liberty is dead I wondered?
I had now decided to lean into actively researching systemic sexism in songcraft and to work only with women on this project. I wanted to look in more detail into the research gaps I had uncovered in the report for government and I had been cross referencing books on gender with books on songcraft. I decided to write ‘Cycle Breaker’, an idea I had inspired by my love for Meredith Grey from Grey’s Anatomy and I decided to approach friend and colleague Anjali Perinparaja.
Anjali was the perfect choice for a cowrite – she is a brilliant song crafter, she has girls a similar age to Liberty, she has her own experience of loss and of suffering intersectional systemic inequality – and we both identify of ‘cycle breaker’s’ as we raised different and, for me, neurodivergent children. Over time and in the production process, this song came to symbolise to me, the particular difference that my generation of women can make to creating change in gender inequality.
Toys
Written with close friend and mentor Angela Blacklaw. This song was a turning point on the project and indeed the narrative, as we began to explore internalised sexism in the songwriting process itself. We wrote from Liberty’s point of view and indeed Liberty, (as she would be now at 14 – speaks herself in the middle 8 section – how would she see the world as a teenager?). We have extraordinary stories to tell about the responses of our partners and indeed Liberty’s Father to this song.
Sophie says…
This song is perhaps the most emotional and innovative and / or controversial song of the cycle. It is written from Liberty’s point of view and described how she would likely see the world at 14. The story is told via a dystopian story of war and post war, and quotes Macbeth.
I have been deeply inspired by the seminal book Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly on this project and certain facts and stories from that book shocked me so deeply with respect to the reality that teenage girls are facing in 2025. They are also being raised in a world at war run by men. Many male world leaders who seek to oppress women, who are deeply uncreative and refuse to learn. I can only imagine the anger she would have for all this, and Angela and I tried to tell it through the song ‘Toy’s’.
There are few female songwriters I respect as much as Angela. She is also slightly older than me and incredibly wise and I trusted her to tackle this song with me. We looked at the research data and discussed the challenge ahead. Before, during and after the writing and redrafting, we continually interrogated our writing process and each creative judgement as we made it – looking at how we selected our melodic, harmonic and lyrical choices and how we responded to the ideas and choices presented by ourselves and of each other and all the while comparing these decisions against the sexism we see present within the songcrafting and A&R processes. We discovered some surprising and enlightening things along the way!
Peaceful Warrior
Hannah Rose Platt’s renown research skills and the sublime songcraft of Nadine Yomi enabled me to bring the song cycle together at this point, to voice the ‘message’ of this entire narrative. As a director of the F List, a leader in music education and a gender/music researcher, I feel clear that how I can make a difference is to lobby for equality in the making of art, and specifically music. This song explores why that matters and is inspired directly by ‘Rage Becomes Her’ by Soraya Chemaly taking her phrase ‘Wise Anger’ for the chorus.
Sophie says…
I wanted to write a song which presented the message and context for this whole song cycle and I wanted to research a historical figure to speak to and about to give me a sense of history within all this. I thought that could perhaps be Jane Austen but hadn’t fleshed the idea out yet. I did know that there was only one woman to approach for that co-writing process – my close friend Hannah Rose Platt, who’s research and historical story telling based songwriting work is second to none. Hannah herself was in the midst of writing an album inspired by a feminist text and does not write for other people very much, so I was delighted when she said yes! Hannah set about her usual meticulous research and quickly reminded me of Enheduanna, an ancient warrior princess who I had actually told her about long ago, and who is the first person we know engaged in creative writing, specifically war poetry.
Since I wanted to lean into the strong war metaphors from Toys it seemed perfect. I had also been thinking a lot about the ancient sounds that I hear at yoga class and how they will inform the sound scape when we start to record, and I suddenly realised the song should sum up me and my mission. This is my song, my manifesto if you like, with respect to all I know and think about the vital importance of equality in the creative arts and specifically song. I cast myself as a ‘peaceful warrior’.
We had so much detail and context and purpose for this song, that we realised we would benefit from a third cowriter to keep us in line with respect to message and craft – Nadine Yomi is a master song crafter I have known for years, and she agreed to the task. Nadie helped us see the bigger human story in amongst all the other detail and came up with the concept that creatively is the opposite of destruction. Creating life and destroying it are perhaps opposites .. we need new ideas as we move into the uncertain future of the world, and we need more female leaders. My own mission is to lead and advocate within the creative arts, and my late daughter Liberty is now and has become, through this song cycle creation process, my guiding light and purpose inspiring me every day in that mission.
Love: The Ultimate Weapon
The Ultimate Weapon. To some extent this song cycle is dystopian as we move through war and destruction in songs 4 and 5. This final song restores peace and truth and importantly brings love and human connection back to the fore. I was inspired by the TV drama ‘Years and Years’ to create an omnipotent female voice who takes control post destruction, to restore balance to humanity. This is my vision of a positive future where everyone is equal.
Sophie says…
I wrote this song alone. I actually wrote the two piano based book-ends to the song cycle, ‘Unwritten Song and Love: The Ultimate Weapon’, before the four internal songs. I started writing this song the weekend when the Taliban took back control of Afghanistan and was still finishing the song when Russia invaded Ukraine. When it comes to Ukraine and Russia, I think a lot about the mothers losing their sons to that war .. and for what?
All I could think about that weekend in Afghanistan were the teenage girls being told there is no more education. Liberty would be 14 now.
‘Love The Ultimate Weapon’ is a song I am very proud of. It personifies love casting it as a chemical weapon, an unstoppable force, more powerful than any other on earth. I have learnt so much about love from Liberty. The fact that love is the ultimate and most powerful force on earth, always ready to step into any void and take control in any situation, is something that, since her death, I completely and utterly believe in.