There is no other artist I relate to more personally in her writing and music than Christina Perri. My favourite female troubadour and balladeer is back with yet another beautiful composition. Much of her music reveals itself slowly, growing stronger with each listen, and Tiny Victories is very much one of those songs. When I first heard it, I wasn’t even sure I liked it. But, as is often the case with her work, the more I listened, the deeper it went and the more it stayed with me.
What is striking about Perri’s music is that, although it often deals with grief and depression – as Tiny Victories clearly does – it somehow ends up feeling uplifting and even therapeutic. What could easily sound heavy or bleak instead offers comfort and reassurance to the listener.
Allow me to digress briefly with a personal example of how this song affected me. I was walking down a busy street near where I live, headphones on as usual. I wasn’t feeling great that morning – flat, unsettled, and just “blah.” When Tiny Victories came on, my first thought was that this was probably not what I needed in that mood. But as I kept listening, the words cut through the noise around me and slowly settled in my mind.
By the end of the song, I felt calmer and more grounded, as if something had gently reset my thinking. Lines like, “But every day that I don’t hide myself away / To me, is a tiny victory,” rang painfully true to my own life. Sometimes just showing up really is enough.
At times, Christina Perri’s music feels like a kind of car wash for the mind. It cleans things out. It feels as helpful for the listener as it must be for her to write it. That, I think, is her great gift. Even when the subject matter is dark, the message is quietly hopeful. Tiny Victories reminds us that small steps matter, and that we don’t need to demand too much of ourselves. As the Spanish saying goes, poco a poco – little by little.
As my yogi guru Nirvair Singh Khalsa once said, “It’s not the life you lead, but the courage you bring to it.” The fact that a single song can trigger this kind of reflection shows how deeply Perri’s music can reach, at least for me. Her writing is precise, honest, and emotionally sharp – at times approaching a Leonard Cohen level of craft. I just feel grateful to be let in and hear it.
[Verse 1]
Some days, I Iook in the mirror and I think
The meanest things, all the meanest things
Some days, I’m holding my self-worth up
By a string, a string
But every day that I don’t hide myself away
To me, is a tiny victory
[Verse 2]
Some days, it feels like a wrecking ball swinging
Through my ribcage, my ribcage
Some nights I’m just a million broken pieces singin’
On a stage
I’m a little more broken open, but a little more free
And that’s a tiny victory
[Chorus]
And if battles can win a war
I can keep picking my sword up off the floor
And learn to treasure these
Tiny victories, tiny victories
[Verse 3]
Some days, givin’ up on myself looks so
So easy to do, it’s so easy to do
The struggle is slow, I’m barely movin’ the needle
And the cracks may be few, but there’s light coming through
[Chorus]
And if battles can win a war
I can keep picking my sword up off the floor
And learn to treasure these
Tiny victories, tiny victories
Tiny victories, tiny victories
[Outro]
Every day that I don’t hide myself away
Every day that I don’t hide myself away
To me, is a tiny victory
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
Matt, thank you again, I’d have never known of her. You know I believe she’s just wonderful. This is the kind of song that moves me…
You know, I just wished Cohen was alive long enough to listen to her songs like ‘People Like You’ and ‘Evergone’. I’m sure he would have been blown away.
absolutely agree, sometimes genius flies under the obvious…