Songfacts®:

• In "Rise," Sarah McLachlan looks at the divisive political climate and asks us all to rise above it.
  
  "It was a very timely social statement, which I haven't really done before," she told American Songwriter. "If we choose to continue to be on opposite sides, and point fingers, and blame, and live in that anger and fear, we're never going to get anywhere. Coming out of COVID, we need each other. I was hoping that would bring us together as a world. It did, and then everything got ridiculous and pulled everybody apart again. I think that we need to keep trying to build bridges and keep trying to keep lines of communication open and recognize our shared humanity."
• The first verse seems to reference the war in Ukraine and the overturning of Roe v. Wade:
  
  This time is gonna be different
  I heard it on the news
  Men are gonna lay their weapons down
  Women keep the right to choose
  
  McLachlan, though, wrote the song prior to those events.
• McLachlan wrote the song with Anne Preven and Luke Doucet. Preven co-wrote the '90s hit "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia; Doucet has a long history with McLachlan, dating back to the early '90s when he was her touring guitarist. He has songwriting credits on three tracks from Sarah's 2014 album Shine On.
• Sarah McLachlan started performing "Rise" in 2022 but didn't release it until three years later on her Better Broken album. The album came out around the same time as the documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, which chronicles the groundbreaking festival McLachlan organized in 1997.