Songfacts®:

• In a Songfacts interview with Extreme lead singer Gary Cherone, he called this song "a cautionary tale on the rise and fall of fame." He experience this firsthand when Extreme's second album, Pornograffitti, sold over two million copies after it was released in 1990. Cherone later became the frontman of Van Halen, one of the most revered rock bands in history. Of course, with every rise there is a fall, but he learned to get back up. He says the song deals with "the pitfalls of what comes along with having our dreams come true."
• "Rise" is the first single from Extreme's appropriately named sixth album, Six. They went on hiatus in 1996 after releasing their first four albums, then regrouped in 2007 and issued their fifth album, Saudades De Rock, in 2008. Not long after releasing Saudades De Rock, Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme became Rihanna's touring guitarist. He joined her on stage for the Super Bowl halftime show in 2023.
• Extreme are best known for their acoustic hits "Hole Hearted" and "More Than Words," but as you can tell from Nuno Bettencourt's blistering guitar solo on this track, they're rooted in hard rock. The Six album is balanced out with the acoustic numbers "Small Town Beautiful" and "Other Side of the Rainbow."
• At first, this comes off as a straightforward song about finding your strength, but then the lyric gets more nuanced. "The chorus is almost misleading in the sense that it's uplifting," Cherone told Songfacts. "'We're going to lift you up, up. Rise.' But then the third line is, 'We're gonna raise you up, then rip you apart.' I see these reaction videos where new fans are watching the video and they're trying to explain, 'Oh, it's an uplifting song.' And then they hear that line and you see them twisting their heads, going, 'This isn't what I thought it was.'"
• The pride-before-the-fall theme is one the band has explored in the past. You'll find it in their 1995 song "Hip Today" and in their 2008 track "Star."
• Nuno Bettencourt produced this song and also directed the video, which captures the band's live energy as we see them perform the track.
• Nuno Bettencourt and Gary Cherone wrote this song with the singer-songwriter Jordan Ferreira, who has credits on four songs from the Six album. Bettencourt and Cherone have always been the songwriting nucleus in Extreme; they started bringing in outside writers after the band re-formed in 2007.