A lot of us are going through a rough time right now, to put it mildly, and UK-based pop artist Ciara Vizzard can relate. Several years ago, she lost two family members over the course of a week, and a few months later, someone set her car on fire. “I felt so attacked,” she remembers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Needing a positive attitude adjustment, she wrote “Victory,” a song about triumphing over challenges, to give herself a mental boost. “I wrote this song to say, ‘You can try to bring me down, but I’m still going to get up and still going to have a victory,'” she says. “The song is me talking to the devil and basically saying, ‘F off.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, declaring victory was premature – soon after the song was written, Vizzard’s grandmother, who she was living with, died, and the singer was in an accident that required four surgeries on her leg. By the time the fourth procedure had been completed, quarantine had started, so Vizzard remained sidelined, essentially unable to leave her home. But the message within “Victory” remained, and at this point, it wasn’t just Vizzard who needed to hear it. Today, its release offers some very needed encouragement as much of the world re-enters quarantine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I feel like more people can now relate to that feeling of being totally knocked around and working really hard to be getting back up and be like, ‘I’m not gonna be defeated by this year,'” she says. “I guess it’s my fight song. When I listen to it now, I still relate to the lyrics. I still feel the emotion just as much as I felt when I first wrote it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n