Sia has announced her upcoming album This is Acting will be released on 29 January and dropped a second song from it called Bird Set Free.
It follows the Australian pop singer-songwriter’s first single from the album, Alive, which she released in September. The prolific artist has written some of the biggest hits of the decade, and said Alive was originally written with British singer Adele in mind. At one point it was also offered to Rihanna.
In an interview earlier this year, Sia revealed how she came to name the album. “I’m calling it This Is Acting because they are songs I was writing for other people, so I didn’t go in thinking ‘this is something I would say’. It’s more like play-acting. It’s fun,” she said.
While it is unclear if the piano ballad Bird Set Free was also written for another artist, lyrics hint at it being from the perspective of someone who feels suffocated or silenced. “I had a voice but I could not sing/You had worn me down, I struggled on the ground,” Sia sings.
Alongside her musical career, Sia recently announced she would take up the director’s chair for her first film. Titled Sister, it will feature the dancer Maddie Ziegler, who has played a young version of Sia in several of the singer’s music videos, including for the hit song Chandelier, as well as during public performances.
Appearing at a side event to the Venice film festival, Sia said: “I was too embarrassed to tell anyone I wanted to make a movie because I thought it would be seen as a vanity project because I was a singer ... And then last year, after I made the Chandelier video, I realised that I was pretty good at directing, so I felt a little bit braver.”
Sia’s 2014 album 1000 Forms Of Fear became a career game-changer for the singer, who told NME she was disinterested in the fame and only released it to complete the terms of her publishing deal. However, when it was a surprise global hit she was spurred on to continue releasing music.
