Special One-Off Collaboration
Free
Bird
The Cohen Brothers
feat. Lynsey Tibbs
An arena-rock anthem rebuilt from the ground up — acoustic guitars, resonant slide, mandolin, and the unhurried warmth of a fireside evening.
Special One-Off Collaboration
The Cohen Brothers
feat. Lynsey Tibbs
An arena-rock anthem rebuilt from the ground up — acoustic guitars, resonant slide, mandolin, and the unhurried warmth of a fireside evening.
The Recording
Originally recorded by Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1973, Free Bird is one of rock's most epic monuments — eight minutes of electric abandon capped by a blistering guitar solo. Here, The Cohen Brothers and Lynsey Tibbs do the opposite: they slow it down, breathe it out, and let the song exist in quiet, unhurried space.
This is a one-off pairing — a single collaboration that exists precisely because the chemistry between Lionel's acoustic arrangements and Lynsey's voice felt too right to leave unrecorded.
The Artists
The Cohen Brothers is the acoustic folk project of Lionel Cohen — a long-running labour of love dedicated to stripping back the songs he grew up loving. Arena anthems, synth-pop, classic soul, and singer-songwriter confessionals alike are rebuilt with acoustic guitars, mandolins, and the warm intimacy of a performance played close and slow.
The project began in 2007 with Extracts from the Acoustic Sessions, reimagining Guns N' Roses, Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Rihanna, and Bowie across ten tracks. Three further volumes followed, culminating in the 2022 Music of the Vietnam War — an entire album of protest anthems and era-defining soundtrack songs, from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Rolling Stones.
Lynsey Tibbs brings a voice of rare warmth and presence — the kind that makes a song feel like a confidence. On Free Bird, she inhabits the lyric with folk-singer directness: no artifice, just breath and feeling.
The Acoustic Sessions
Under the banner of The Cohen Brothers, Lionel has spent nearly two decades pursuing one simple, radical act: taking songs built for stadiums and electric amplification, and asking what remains when all of that is removed.
The project began in 2007 with Extracts from the Acoustic Sessions, a ten-track collection that moved between Guns N' Roses, Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Rihanna, and David Bowie — artists whose only obvious common ground was that their songs, it turned out, had something to say without the distortion pedals.
The warmth of the response led to three further volumes. By 2022, the project had grown ambitious enough to dedicate an entire album — Music of the Vietnam War — to the protest anthems and soundtrack songs of an era: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Rolling Stones, and beyond.
Free Bird, then, is a natural chapter in that story: rock's great, sky-bound hymn to freedom, walked back indoors, made intimate, and handed to a singer whose voice knows exactly how to hold it.