You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

Little Sims is a rapper from England who put out her first album in 2015.

She's won the Mercury Prize, a Brit Award, and three mobile awards.

She also starred in the Netflix series Top Boy.

Her most recent album is called Lotus and came out in June 2025,

and it followed a pretty tumultuous time in her career.

For this episode, I got to talk to Little Sims about one of the songs from that album called Free,

along with Miles Clinton James, who produced the track.

Pushing up the Lo who produced the track. My name is Simby.

What does the story of this song start for you?

This song kind of happened in two parts.

It was the year 2022, like springtime.

I was reading this book called Conversations with God,

and it talks a lot about love and fear

and the duality of those two things. I had this feeling like,

why is it fear and not hate? But that book definitely unlocked that for me. And I was just in a

deep state of documenting my thoughts and feelings on paper. So I kind of wanted to write my take.

So I wrote the words as like a poem.

Would you read the poem?

Yeah.

I think love is understanding that people can change

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