Songfacts®:

• Isolde Fair first garnered attention in 2017 at 13 with her song "To All The Little Girls," written for a school assignment based on the words from Hillary Clinton's concession speech. In 2020, at age 16, she released "Rise," a song that reflects the anxiety many young people in America were struggling with during a time of social, economic and political upheaval. The song is a call to stand above it.
  
  "To me, there is not just one message," Fair explained to Songfacts. "It has my feelings that I felt when I first started writing it and then turned out to be inspired by other feelings and events that happened as I was writing. 'Rise' is about our empowerment and the things we can do like voting, calling out injustice and other types of activism, things are pretty screwed up right now. However someone interprets it, it's cool. It should be the way that people feel whenever they hear the song - a good, bad, or inspirational feeling. Whatever feeling people get from 'Rise,' I hope it makes them feel more empowered to make positive change."
• Fair wrote "Rise" with her mother, the composer Starr Parodi, who produced it with Fair's father, Jeff Eden Fair. Isolde told Songfacts how it came together. "When I started to write 'Rise,' I was just sitting in the car one day, running errands with my mom," she said. "I was daydreaming for a little bit, and I started to look up from the car window at the grey sky, and from that the words 'I've been thinking of a time where everything will be alright' kind of flew out of my mouth - but a mumbled version with the exact verse melody that's in the song. In the minutes after that, I started to have a clear vision of the visuals and what it would be about, but not the complete message yet. I usually hear songs that have one main message that is conveyed in a traditional pop song, but for 'Rise' it still wasn't clear that the message was only about one issue. I'd never thought in a million years that it would have so many meanings or come out the way that it did."
• Fair played piano and violin on this track, instruments she's been playing since she was 5 years old.
• The music video was directed by Sara Nesson with choreography from Bonnie Story, Suzi Lonergan and Bayli Baker. Fair explained: "The 'Rise' video was shot in a small quaint cottage-like house on a ranch in La Tuna Canyon. The reason why the house looked so rundown and unapproachable was because of a fire. A beautiful couple from the family who lived in it, built a life in there as well. A few weeks before the fire happened, the couple watched the movie The Notebook, and from seeing it they had the thought of dying together. On the night of the fire, their wish was granted and came true. From a place of love, I kind of sense that the message of 'Rise' is tied in perfectly with this. Knowing that this place came from someone's feelings of love and unity really allowed the story of 'Rise,' for me, to unfold.
  
  Visually in the story, the dancers represent a suppressed society that is longing for change but is trapped within themselves metaphorically by walls that are surrounding them. Me, who is also playing a suppressed character, is feeling trapped inside herself too, though, before the dancers unite with her - she didn't know they existed. While walking through the house, in the video, the dancer's presence is becoming known to my character. I shared this idea with the super talented and amazing choreographers Bonnie Story, Suzi Lonergan and Bayli Baker about this visual and they came up with a perfect choreography that completely represents the visual I had in my mind of how the dancers would be dancing in the story playing in my head."