Songfacts®:

• The third single from Michelle Willis' sophomore album, Just One Voice, finds the Canadian singer-songwriter looking for a fresh start in the Big Apple.
  
  "Liberty is a word that carries a lot of weight right now, but I'm presenting it to you here from the viewpoint of 28-year-old Michelle in 2014," she explained on her Facebook page. "I was a Toronto kid visiting NYC, fully embracing my singer-songwriter-on-Brooklyn-bridge-cliché, dreaming about moving, about everything I wanted ahead of me and everything I hoped to get a clean slate from. It was a carefree state of mind. It's a song about change, dreaming, finding my own way, and doubt. Once we obtain the thing we're striving for, what then? And what have we carted along for the ride?"
• This features background vocals from David Crosby and Michael McDonald. Willis started collaborating with Crosby in 2016, the same year she released her solo debut, See Us Through. She appeared on his Lighthouse album and became a fixture in his Sky Trails and Lighthouse bands on multiple tours. In 2022, she told the Songfacts Podcast that Crosby encouraged her to improvise and pushed to her pursue her ideas while they were fresh.
  
  "Cros has this childlike - like a puppy - spirit about music and he believes in it so hard," she explained. "I don't believe in it nearly as much as he does, and I really believe in music. But he puts his life on it, and that alone has been so important to me over the last number of years. When we're writing, it's always like, 'You have an idea now, let's do it now! Write it down! Why don't we try this? Hey, did you think of this?'"
• Willis described how her famous guest vocalists influenced the song long before it was recorded. "The vocal harmonies here may as well have been taken from a Michael McDonald background vocal arranging class," she noted on social media. "I'm certain that subconsciously I was writing with his voice and style in mind. In the outro, it's both him and my mentor and friend David Crosby singing 'a city takes me by storm,' which is a beautiful beckoning to me of all that was to come. I had no idea I was about to begin a career writing and touring with Croz."
• The music video, directed by David Bailen, follows Willis on a lone journey through the streets of Brooklyn. The first half of video is in black-and-white before it bursts into color near the end. Willis recalled the experience on Twitter: "We filmed 'Liberty' in slow motion, so in order for me to sing along with the lyrics we had to speed up the track. I burst out laughing when I first heard it, but after hearing it 100x I thought... I can dig this Chipmunks vibe."
• This is the second track on the album, following the meditative "10ths." She wanted to start with something softer before launching into the rhythmic "Liberty" because she didn't want listeners to think the album was chock-full of bangers.