Wake Up On September 11th With Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising"

There’s rising to a higher plane of existence, a rising to heaven, and then there’s the firefighters, rising up up the stairwells of the World Trade Center to their fate on 9/11.

“One of the most powerful images of the 11th, that I’d read in the paper, some of the people coming down were talking about the emergency workers who were ascending,” said Springsteen on “Nightline” at the time of the album’s release in June of 2002. “The idea of those guys going up the stairs, up the stairs, ascending, ascending. I mean you could be ascending a smoky staircase, you could be in the afterlife, moving on.”