Songfacts®:

• "Like A Bird" is the big song from the movie Sing Sing, which tells the story of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. The program is real but the film tells a fictional story, with Colman Domingo starring as an inmate who is wrongfully imprisoned but finds purpose through the RTA theater group.
  
  The song plays at the end of the film when real-life footage from the prison is shown.
• The song is a collaboration between the guitarists Adrian Quesada and Abraham Alexander, who teamed up to write and perform the song for the movie. Quesada is best known for his work in the duo Black Pumas, whose 2019 song "Colors" is a standout. Alexander records as a solo artist and has collaborated with Leon Bridges; he co-wrote the 2024 Bridges song "Ivy."
• The song is written from the perspective of a prisoner yearning for his freedom. "'Like A Bird' is a song about longing to ascend, but there's doubt there," Abraham Alexander explained.
• According to Alexander and Quesada, Sing Sing's director, Greg Kwedar, gave them plenty of creative freedom with this song. "He was really into supporting whatever our vision was," Quesada said. "He let us paint on this canvas, and he also had some amazing ideas. I've been floored by the support and the response to it."
• "Like A Bird" earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song but lost to "El Mal" from Emilia Pérez. Colman Domingo was nominated for Best Actor by lost to Adrien Brody in The Brutalist.