Conviction

Album: Comet, Come to Me (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is about a woman who keeps going back to her partner, believing that somehow it will work out despite all evidence to the contrary. "The easiest lies to tell are the lies you tell yourself," Ndegeocello said in our 2014 interview. "It's hard to get out of that, because you just can't accept reality. It's hard to swallow."
  • Comet, Come to Me is Meshell Ndegeocello's eleventh album. Early in her career, she wrote very personal and political songs, but later became more of an observational songwriter, often looking to her close friends for lyrical inspiration. This song is about one of these friends who was going through a toxic relationship, which by the time the album was released, had finally dissolved.
  • The title doesn't show up in the lyric, which is not uncommon for Ndegeocello, since she assigns titles after a song is written. She named this one "Conviction" because she liked the double meaning of the word and how either meaning could relate to the song: you can have strong personal convictions (beliefs), and also have a conviction in the legal sense, as in an arrest.

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