The 2025 Rise Up Music Project
Welcome to the 2025 Rise Up Music Project: a year-long exercise in creativity, accountability, and community.
Our project brings together 33 songwriters, each assigned a specific day of the month to write and record an original song. Every day of 2025, a new piece of music will be released, reflecting the voices, stories, and artistry of our diverse group. This unique structure ensures a constant flow of art and challenges each songwriter to balance commitment with craft.
Our Philosophy
We recognize creativity as self-care: Allowing ourselves the opportunity to make something is the ultimate way to honor our lives and the wild odds that we even exist.
We believe that consistency breeds inspiration: By providing a framework of accountability, we stay in motion and explore new ideas under the gentle pressure of a deadline.
We celebrate process over product: Each song represents a moment in time: proof that creation thrives with constraint and that every step contributes to the larger vision.
We value the collective impact: Music, like anything, is at its most powerful when shared. Our 33 voices blend into a year-long symphony, each piece distinct yet part of something greater.
In a time when creativity is often commodified, the Rise Up Music Project stands as a quiet revolution. It’s more than just a year of music; it’s a deliberate act of artistic resistance. By choosing to create within this framework, our songwriters are rejecting the idea that art must be perfect, viral, or immediately profitable to matter.
This project invites us to consider:
Art as Activism: Each song is a statement, a snapshot of its creator’s world on that specific day. By amplifying diverse voices, we are fostering an inclusive platform for stories that might otherwise go unheard. Like revolutionary movements, this project thrives on collaboration, persistence, and the belief that change starts with a single act of creation.
Community Over Individualism: In an era of hyper-individualism, this is a group effort—33 artists working in parallel while retaining their unique perspectives. The resulting tapestry of sound is a testament to the power of unity in diversity, echoing the idea that strength comes from shared purpose.
Vulnerability as Strength: The act of showing up consistently to create can be a bold statement in a world that often places value on immediacy over authenticity. The 2025 Project embraces imperfection as a natural part of the process, encouraging vulnerability and growth.
An Invitation
Allow us a little space for sappiness, will ya? This is not just about music; it’s about hope. Revolutions don’t always start with marches or manifestos—sometimes, they begin with a song. Through the daily ritual of creation, our artists are contributing to a larger conversation about resilience, the transformative power of self-reflection, and the possibility of something extraordinary emerging from an ever-growing pile of little everyday efforts.
Rise Up isn’t just for those creating the music; it’s for everyone who listens, shares, and finds inspiration in these songs, no matter how raw or polished they may be. Together, we provide momentum to an idea that values the transformative power of art, rooted in authenticity and connection.
Whether you’re an artist, a dreamer, or someone searching for a spark, this project is a reminder that creation is an act of hope, and that hope itself is revolutionary.
Let the music inspire you, let the stories move you, and let the daily rhythm of this project remind you that change—like art—happens one step, one note, and one day at a time.
Our History
The Rise Up Music Project was founded in late 2018 by Matt Halvorson as a daily music podcast and creative challenge.
In 2019, Rise Up shared a new song (almost) every day — one that had been written and recorded in real-time, often just days or hours before being released, with an intention to reflect the emotional and physical experience of the artist at that time.
Personal storytelling, music, creative exhaustion, exploration-of-identity and an overarching sense of art as activism defined the year, as so many people came together to share their lives through music.
You can find all those songs here (or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you find podcasts).
From 2019 until its reawakening in 2025, The Rise Up Music Project continued on as a small-potatoes record label, with the occasional livestream event mixed in here and there.