Songfacts®:

• "Rise To It" is "basically a boner joke." At least that's how Bob Halligan, Jr., who wrote the song with Paul Stanley of Kiss, describes it.
  
  Stanley is the lead vocalist, letting the lady know that when they get in the bedroom, he's going to "rise" to the occasion.
• In a Songfacts interview with Bob Halligan, Jr., he talked about writing this song with Stanley. When the session was arranged, Halligan, who had written songs for Judas Priest ("Some Heads Are Gonna Roll") and Kix ("Don't Close Your Eyes"), did a little method acting, getting into character as a Kiss persona.
  
  "A lot of times with songwriting, you create a punch line and then you create the story that leads up to it that makes it funny or makes it land," he said. "Sometimes the punchline arrives as you're creating the story that's leading up to it. Other times, you work backwards. More commonly we work backwards, particularly in the Nashville world where you start with a title or an idea and then think, how do we set that up?
  
  I have a feeling that I had the 'rise to it' line. A lot of times, the vocal is a duet with the instrument you're writing the song on, so 'rise to it,' then the guitar... 'you know I really can do it.'
  
  So there's a back and forth. You like to have them sort of answer each other and complement each other. Once I had the first verse and chorus and the intro, I said, 'Geez, these guys are grownups.' You know, some of the hard rock guys, especially when they're very young, you can hand them what essentially is a great song or the beginnings of a hit, and they're not into it because they don't feel ownership of it and they just want to play fast guitar riffs, whereas I knew Gene [Simmons] and Paul were bringing me in because they wanted to have hit records, and if they heard something they felt was that or could become that, they would jump on it, and that's exactly what happened with 'Rise To It.' Paul came to my apartment, I played him the intro, first verse and the chorus, and then back to the intro and repeated the verse and the chorus. He said, 'Man, that's great. Let's finish it.'"
• Kiss were makeup-free during this period, which lasted from 1983 to 1996. They play to this in the music video, which flashes back to 1975 in a vignette where the band is putting on their makeup and talking about whether or not they really need it. "Without the makeup? I think you're nuts," Simmons says. "Gene, there's nothing we can't do," Stanley replies before the scene shifts to the band performing the song in the present.
  
  Kiss had a different lineup in 1975, with Ace Frehley on guitar and Peter Criss on drums. to get around this in the video, they just showed the backs of the heads of Bruce Kulick and Eric Carr, their guitarist and drummer at the time.
  
  The video was directed by Mark Rezyka, whose other credits include "In My House" by Mary Jane Girls and "Nobody's Fool" by Cinderella.
• "Rise To It" was the third single from Kiss' Hot In The Shade album, following "Hide Your Heart" and "Forever." Stanley co-wrote and sang lead on all three songs. The band was enjoying a resurgence, with new fans coming in and older ones still on board. The album was their last to go Platinum, selling over a million copies in America.
• Halligan and Stanley teamed to write another song that also landed on the Hot In The Shade album: "Read My Body." Halligan started writing more Christian Contemporary songs and in 1995 formed a popular Celtic-infused band called Ceili Rain.