Songfacts®:

• "Lift Me Up" is an emotional ballad about reconnecting with a departed loved one. Over regal piano chords, Rihanna sings to her lost beloved, asking for their protection against life's harsh realities.
  
  Lift me up
  Hold me down
  Keep me close
  Safe and sound
• Rihanna recorded "Lift Me Up" for the soundtrack of the Marvel movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The song is also a tribute to the late actor Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020 of colon cancer. Chadwick played King T'Challa, the protagonist in the original 2018 Black Panther film.
• Nigerian singer-songwriter Tems wrote the stirring song alongside Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, and Rihanna.
  
  "After speaking with Ryan and hearing his direction for the film and the song, I wanted to write something that portrays a warm embrace from all the people that I've lost in my life," Tems explained. "I tried to imagine what it would feel like if I could sing to them now and express how much I miss them."
• Ludwig Göransson, who wrote the score for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, also produced this sparse percussion-less ballad.
• Rihanna's own Westbury Road label released "Lift Me Up" in partnership with Roc Nation, Def Jam Recordings and Hollywood Records as the lead single from the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack on October 28, 2022. The song marked RiRi's first solo musical output since 2016, so it was a huge coup for the Black Panther franchise.
• Rihanna was Coogler's first choice for the soundtrack, in part because she became a mother in May 2022. "We knew she was at a point in her life as well where she was focusing on different things - focused on business, motherhood, which is a big theme in our film," he said. "We were holding out hope that maybe it could work out and boy did it for this song."
• The Autumn Durald Arkapaw-directed video depicts Rihanna strolling along an empty beach at sunset interspersed with brief scenes from the film. American cinematographer Durald Arkapaw was director of photography on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
• "Lift Me Up" came together when Göransson and Coogler flew to Nigeria to meet with some prospective artists for the soundtrack. The pair talked about how they wanted to honor Chadwick Boseman with a sonic love letter. Coogler started jotting down lyrics in his notebook on a flight after hearing some chords Göransson had recorded.
  
  "We worked on a melody, which would become the chorus, and brought those ideas to Tems in Lagos," Göransson recalled to Billboard. "She really brought it to life."
  
  "Rihanna saw the movie a few months after becoming a mother and wanted to get involved," he continued. "So we spent three weeks kind of painstakingly going through every part of it and it just came together."
• The emotional ballad soundtracks the final scene in the film, which pays tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman and his character King T'Challa. "When you hear her voice and the lyrics, that's the point where you finally take it all in," Ludwig Göransson told Billboard. "You can see what a great filmmaker Ryan [Coogler] is because in the scene right before you hear the song, it's absolute silence. You see all these flashbacks, all these memories, and then you interrupt that [with] a song honoring Chadwick and T'Challa."
• Rihanna delivered a very emotional performance of this song at the Academy Awards in 2023, where it was nominated for Best Original Song. It was the first time she performed the song and her first performance since the Super Bowl halftime show a month earlier.
  
  "Lift Me Up" was going up against Lady Gaga's "Hold My Hand" from another blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick, but the winner was "Naatu Naatu," a song in the Telugu language from the Indian film RRR. We didn't see that one coming.