The Rising is the 12th studio album by Bruce Springsteen, released in 2002. In addition to being Springsteen's first studio album in seven years, it was also his first with the E Street Band in 18 years. It is centered around Springsteen's reflections on the September 11, 2001 attacks. Upon its release, The Rising was a critical and commercial success, and hailed as the triumphant return of "The Boss". It debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart, with first-week sales of over 520,000 copies. With this, Springsteen became the oldest person to achieve a first-week sales of over a Read more on Last.fm.
Only Springsteen could write an entire record about 9/11 and not once mention or really even explicitly refer to it. The Rising is about people living in America after 9/11. It’s about our fears, our dreams and our grief. It’s about hope and it’s about pain. Springsteen touched on a singular, uniting emotion and ran with it for these powerful, sturdy fourteen tracks. Let it be said that at a moment when more badly written, cartoonishly over the top first level crap was being written to cash in on the attacks, The Boss said his piece quietly and effectively without ever penning a sub par lyric.