Viola Durfee

Viola Durfee‘s “Free” is about Lila, a 15-year-old girl with autism. Intelligent and quirky, she is proud of her low voice which has placed her as the only tenor in her choir of sopranos. Lila sings this song to herself, as she imagines what it would be like to be free from the taunts and teasing she regularly endures and to stop having to pretend she’s someone other than herself. Eventually, the voices inside her head telling her she can’t achieve what she wants get louder and louder until she lets it all out at once. But that release sends her back to basics and she decides that while not accepting others’ negative opinions about her is hard, it’s not impossible and she can “spread these wings and fly away / And I think I know just the way.”