Songfacts®:

• Drenched in a bath of acoustic guitars, "The River Rise" is a solo track from Mark Lanegan, best known as the lead singer of Screaming Trees. Typical of his work, the lyrics are abstract and emotive, a window into his struggles to survive in a world where he often felt like an outsider. "I could fall like a tear, well there's nothing else I can do," he sings.
  
  Lanegan died in 2022 at 57.
• This song has a very intriguing open that sounds like a combination of whistling and Tibetan Singing Bowls. The instrument is actually a cymbal played by J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. In Greg Prato's book Lanegan, John Agnello, who mixed the track, explained how it happened.
  
  "I had Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. play those cymbal swells – Mark loved that idea," he said. "We recorded in this interesting studio called Messina Music, that had millions of cookie jars. And the intro that was the whistling and the jingling is a cookie jar. Mark thought it was amazing, so I put a mic on it, and that's how we started the record – which I thought was hilarious, and really thinking out of the box."
• "The River Rise" is sometimes interpreted as an ode to Kurt Cobain, who was good friends with Lanegan. The song, though, was released a few months before Cobain's suicide in 1994.
  
  The song does appear in tribute to Cobain as part of the 1996 grunge documentary Hype! It's also on the soundtrack.
• The song is part of Mark Lanegan's second solo album, Whiskey For The Holy Ghost, released in 1994. Screaming Trees released released their most successful album, Sweet Oblivion, two years earlier but were taking a break - success pulled them apart, as it often does. Lanegan started venturing into other projects, often collaborating with Mad Season. Screaming Trees released another album in 1996, but they folded the tent in 2000. Lanegan continued his solo work and kept collaborating with other artists, including Queens Of The Stone Age and Masters Of Reality.