There are songs that entertain, and then there are songs that enter the bloodstream of a moment — songs that become part of the memory itself. Nina Simone’s Feeling Good is one of those pieces: timeless, fierce, and filled with a kind of liberation that can only be sung by someone who has lived through storms and learned to breathe again.

Written for the 1965 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd, the song could easily have remained a theatre number. But once Simone took it into her hands, it became something altogether different: a declaration of renewal, a reclaiming of one’s own life, a rising.
Her voice doesn’t simply sing the words “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me,” — she embodies them, turning each note into an anthem of self-returning.

For many people, the track represents triumph, freedom, or personal awakening. For me, it carries an even deeper thread of meaning.

A New Dawn in the Midst of a Turbulent Time

In 2020 — a year when the world felt upside down and the simplest things became complicated — I got married. Not in the way I once imagined, not with crowded rooms or wide-open joy, but in the quiet, restricted, strangely sacred space that only a pandemic could create.

As a widow stepping into a new chapter, the weight of the moment was immense. I had already lived through loss; I knew what it meant to rebuild. And yet, here I was, choosing love again in a world that was holding its breath.

There were rules, limitations, empty pews where family should have sat. But there was also grace — the deep, steady kind that holds you when everything shifts.

And when we stepped out of the church as newlyweds, the doors opening to a world still half-paused, we played Feeling Good.

It echoed across the stone, across the unexpected stillness of a Covid-quiet street. Nina Simone’s voice lifted the moment into something luminous. It didn’t feel ironic or mismatched. It felt exactly right — a celebration that understood complexity, a joy that didn’t deny what had been lost, a new beginning acknowledging all that came before it.

It was perfect.

Why This Song Endures

Feeling Good continues to resonate because it speaks to the human ability to rise — not untouched, not unchanged, but renewed. It is joy with depth. Hope with history. Freedom that has been earned.

Every time I hear it now, I am taken back to that doorway:
the cold air, my heart pounding, the sense of stepping forward into a future that was both uncertain and full of promise.

A new dawn.
A new day.
A new life — for me.

And yes… it did feel good.