Songfacts®:

• "I Will Overcome" is a grandiose orchestral song where Raye starts to pull her life together after a litany of emotional traumas. Raye's talent was never in question, but she ran into problems with her record label that led to her self-releasing her debut album, My 21st Century Blues, in 2023. It did very well, but then the trolls and haters came out, and Raye unfortunately read their missives on social media. This song deals with that time in her life but ends on a positive note: "She will overcome."
• Raye says the key lines in the song are:
  
  Aren't we all broken people? We just perfect how to hide it
  But it's life's guarantee that we're all going to die
  
  At some point, the finite nature of life kicked in and she realized that obsessing over slights and imperfections (real and imagined) wasn't doing her any good.
• The song is part of Raye's This Music May Contain Hope album, which is divided into four "seasons." The album opens with a the spoken-word track "Girl Under The Grey Cloud," which leads into "I Will Overcome." These songs are part of the "autumn" section (side 1 on the 2-disc vinyl version), which finds Raye taking a hard look at her life and reflecting on the choices she made. Some details in the lyrics are fictional, but the feeling behind it is autobiographical.
• Raye wrote the song with the London-based composers Tom Richards and Chris Hill. "That track was so fun to do," Hill told Songfacts. "It started in my studio in London with me and Tom around February 2025 - she gave us a bit of a cue and we were trying to write something for her that felt like French film music from the '60s. Immediately when she heard it she was in Paris and went straight to a studio to put down some melodies, and we all knew it was going to be a massive track.
  
  Over the year it developed and developed. Tom did more orchestration, we dug deep on the drums, we wrote the intro ("Girl Under The Grey Cloud") in France, which also gave us the final section of the song. Mike [co-producer Mike Sabath] also came in on it and kind of turned it all up to 11. We went to Abbey Road and recorded the orchestra. Jon [Castelli] did an insane mix, and it all evolved into the beast it is now."
• Raye has a retro-soul sound that draws comparisons to Amy Winehouse, who gets a mention in this section:
  
  Some people say I remind them of Amy
  Some spit through their keyboards, "I'll never amount"
  And the evil in insults, the arrows from your tongue
  Is the same devils you tortured her with
  
  Winehouse quite publicly struggled with addiction, even writing a song about it: "Rehab." Many judged her from behind their keyboards but few helped her out in her time of need, and she died from alcohol poisoning in 2011 at age 27.
  
  Raye faces the same kind of negative energy when critics and curmudgeons say she's just imitating Winehouse and isn't as good. "What's difficult for me is when people are so horrible, rude, nasty, and evil with their words," she told Elle. "'You'll never be her. You are an absolute failure. You disgust me trying to think that you could even be remotely like she was.' And it's like the funny thing to me about the way they're speaking to me is, it's that same evil. I'm not saying I've experienced even a hundredth of what that girl was put through, but it comes from a similar place. Our beloved Amy would probably still be here today if she didn't have to be subject to all this hate when she was alive."