Rise Up

Album: Speed Of Darkness (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the last track from Speed Of Darkness, the fifth studio album by the Irish-American Celtic punk band Flogging Molly. Vocalist Dave King explained to Alternative Press magazine why the band chose this song to close the set: "That had to be the closer. The album's all about life and its good and its bad. It's a positive end to the way I see life. It's rising up and getting your head above the bulls--t - even if it's one person at a time, it's still a positive motion. I want that wheel to keep in motion. If it's me today, it'll be somebody else tomorrow. I want that for humanity. I want us to f---in' rise up above this s--t. That was the way I heard the album end."
  • The song finds King championing defiant hope. He explained to Alternative Press: "I remember watching a wonderful show in Ireland on the television, it's called Reeling In The Years. It has Irish history and everything involved in whatever year they're talking about. When Ireland was going through its really bad trouble in the North [in the 1970s], there was a meeting in a hall. And it was about the Catholic people who were looking for a one-man-one-vote campaign where they could actually vote. And all the men, women, children sitting in this hall, they were singing 'We Shall Overcome,' and it really hit me, and it reminded me of the Martin Luther King days. And I just had to put that lyric in the chorus."

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