#DiversityInLoss – I Can Love You From Here

Sophie, Liberty’s Mother, recently performed her song I Can Love You From Here at Baby Loss Hour in Leeds. It was a performance that felt as powerful and poignant as the first time I had heard it, the previous year at a Westminster service to MPs and Charities there to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week in 2018. Through the #DiversityInLoss series I wanted to explore also the different ways in which people can communicate and express their emotions following the death of a baby, and therefore with the release in aid of Tommys, the Baby Charity, for this year’s Baby Loss Awareness Week, it felt fitting to welcome Sophie and Liberty in this series. Music is so, so powerful and can mean many different things to different people, providing an outlet and an expression for their emotions that they may not have been able to explore before.

A little background about the song’s release…

Taking up an artist career for the first time, post three children and the necessary career breaks, was neither planned nor undertaken lightly, but Liberty’s Mother came about instinctively, after Sophie was invited to sing at a ceremony for MPs who had lost babies, which took place during Baby Loss Awareness Week 2018. Sophie was asked to perform her original song ‘I Can Love You From Here’, which was written by Sophie just ten weeks after her own baby daughter, Liberty, was stillborn at full term in 2011. The song had not been planned for sharing as part of her professional career, however, the reaction that followed that performance from MPs, charities and health professionals alike, convinced Sophie to record the song in Nashville and, ultimately, to turn it into a not for profit EP project about her experiences as a Mother who has lost her baby.

I asked Sophie to share a little about why and how she wrote for Liberty…

This song is me speaking directly to Liberty.

It is a song that considers what we can do with the love we have for someone we have lost. It is something that I had actually been thinking about for a while, although for different reasons, and then Liberty died.

It became immediately important to me that I solve the problem of what to do with all the love I had and felt for her. A new mother is utterly consumed with love and protection. A new mother who has lost her child has nowhere to direct that love. I wrote this song to direct all of my love to Liberty, every day, wherever she may be.
I have been writing songs for most of my life and I having different ways of writing that work for me at different locations, with different collaborators and different sets of creative intentions at different times. However, there have been just a few super important songs that mean the world to me (with this being the absolute number 1), that I have written in the same way that I wrote this song; Sitting at the piano for quite a few hours without break, to get down what is in my head into one full draft and capture what I am thinking and want to say.

I would add though that, there is a sense at the time of me, not only getting the song down on paper and voice (having thought a lot about the lyric in my head for maybe a few weeks previous) but actually trying to solve a puzzle in my thinking or work out exactly what I think and feel as I sit at the piano. Since I was child, the piano has been like a piece of me, my confidant and best friend who shares my pleasure and my pain and I trust the piano and the writing process at times like this, to help me work out what I think and feel.

There was a sense of relief when I had completed the first draft of the song, (which was then refined over weeks and in fact years through different iterations of the song), because the main hook ‘I Can Love You From Here’, both melodically and lyrically helped me understand what I needed to do as Liberty’s Mother. It has taken me years to work out how to do that, but at least I knew what I needed to do.