Song Premiere: Edie Carey, "Rise"

Across her eight studio albums, Edie Carey has tended to explore the realness of emotions and life in general via her songwriting. Her ninth, The Veil (due June 3), is no exception.

For one of its early singles, “Rise”—premiering here, exclusively, today—Carey dug into her memories of setting out to become a mother. The song she landed on wound up being as much about the often-excruciating fertility journey as it is a song to mother you, to lift up those nurturing relationships that have the power to re-center us all.

Carey explains that she’d experienced a “health crisis that nearly killed me. They [told me], ‘You should be happy to be alive but it’s going to be really hard for you to have kids.’” Determined to try anyway, Carey joined a support group where she was living in Chicago and set out on the emotionally unpredictable, often tumultuous journey to become a mother through invitro fertilization. Faced with the intimidating price tag of IVF, Carey’s husband won the procedure in a raffle. As luck would have it, that is the way their son came to be.

Though her children are now nine and five years old, the memory of trying to build her family was so ripe with emotion that Carey sat down in 2019 to write about the balance of pain and support she experienced as part of this group of women who were trying to become mothers.

Now, releasing the song just before Mother’s Day, Carey is conscious that a casual listener may not hear her plight toward motherhood in its lyrics. “I didn’t make it so specific about fertility,” she admits, adding that it’s for “anybody who’s going through a hard, vulnerable time. What a privilege and honor it is to be able to show up for them and to be able to really be your true self in front of another person. … It’s nice to be in the no-BS zone with someone. That’s where [this song] came from. It started there and then ended up being a song about friendship in the really gritty, true sense of it.”

To back her up, Carey enlisted her friend Rose Cousins to sing backup. The two singer-songwriters have a friendship that has grown and thrived through Carey’s motherhood journey and beyond. “She’s been my best friend for a very long time,” Carey says. “She’s seen me through some pretty tough times and vice-versa, so it felt just right to have her be the one.”

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“Rise” is on Edie Carey’s new album The Veil (out June 3).