I’ve been thinking a lot about trust lately. Who deserves it and how we know when someone’s feeding us bullshit. Maybe it’s because I watched my friend get terrible advice from three different doctors before finding one who actually listened. Maybe it’s because every headline contradicts the last one. But when Audren’s ‘When Freedom Dies’ started playing, with that hypnotic forest intro pulling me somewhere quiet and real, I realized someone just cast a spell about survival.
The track opens in this misty mountain sanctuary where Audren’s voice slides in with “You hear the crowd from the top of the world, you’d better stay where you are.” She delivers it calm but urgent and when she hits that refrain “they lie, unfortunately they lie,” it’s like someone finally saying what we’ve all been thinking. The repetition becomes hypnotic, drilling into your consciousness until you can’t unhear the warning.
Audren calls herself a good witch – a highly intuitive multidisciplinary artist whose whole mission is healing and uplifting people through her art. And fuck if this song doesn’t feel like an actual spell. That tormented jazz phrase that keeps returning (guitar, piano, and bass twisted together) works like a familiar, appearing whenever the danger gets too close. The lineup behind ‘When Freedom Dies’ is equally impressive, featuring drummer Mike Rajamahendra (Michael Bublé) and backing vocalist Sara Seba (Céline Dion, Pharrell Williams).. They’re creating something otherworldly here, literal musical sorcery.
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The mystical angle goes deeper when you learn Audren wrote this while battling Lyme disease. “I had to learn to trust my instincts to survive,” she shares. “To avoid turning paranoid, many individuals choose to follow the crowd, allowing the oligarchy to rule their lives. I needed to write a song about disinformation for people wearing those kinds of absurd blinders, because when you’re ill, you realize that you must demonstrate foresight and sagacity if you don’t want to wind up like a guinea pig.”
She knows about healing through experience, about wisdom earned through suffering. When she sings “You should listen to your insights, then you’ll know what’s good for you,” she’s sharing actual survival knowledge. The way she stretches out “And we know, oh yes we know” feels like an incantation, like she’s marking you with protection against the bullshit.
That guitar solo halfway through channels Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” – another anthem about rejecting false authority – but Audren’s version feels more like a séance than a riot. When the choir joins for “Tell me where is freedom, tell me where is the truth in what we’ve heard,” it sounds like a coven gathering strength.
David Guetta once told her “We’re not playing in the same field. You make music for musicians.” He was right. Audren creates musical spells that rewire your trust circuits. The fact that she disappeared from music because of her illness, became a bestselling novelist in France, then fought her way back to recording proves something powerful about transformation and refusing to stay down.
“In a few days when freedom dies, you’ll see the past through different eyes” might be the most chilling prophecy I’ve heard set to such beautiful music. She’s warning us to “show who you are before they go too far,” and coming from someone who had to fight the medical establishment just to stay alive, who couldn’t trust the standard information channels about her own body, the urgency feels real as fuck.
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What makes Audren so powerful is how she delivers these warnings. No screaming, no preaching. Just this hypnotic, mysterious energy that pulls you into her forest sanctuary and reminds you that “we don’t live for the same fight, we believe in what is right.” She’s giving us permission to trust ourselves, to reject the crowd’s wisdom when our bodies and souls know better.
This track works like a protection spell for anyone who’s ever been gaslit, medically or otherwise. For anyone who’s been told their instincts are wrong, their pain isn’t real, their concerns are paranoid. Audren is here with proof that your inner guide knows what’s safe for you. And she made it beautiful enough that you’ll want to play it on repeat until the message sinks into your bones.
The whole album is called ‘Think Freedom’ and this family affair features both her daughters and her partner Chris Rime producing, along with musicians Christian Martinez and Federico Malaman. After years of being silenced by illness, she’s returned with what she calls “a poetic picture of the tough world we live in and an invitation to make it smooth and beautiful.” This song manages both – acknowledging the lies while offering sanctuary from them.
Stream this when the noise gets too loud and you need to remember what truth feels like. It reminds you survival sometimes means standing still in your own forest while the crowd rushes toward the cliff. Sometimes the most radical act is simply knowing when everyone else is wrong.
