songs about 9/11

"An Open Letter to NYC" - Beastie Boys.

 

the marseillaise was so moving yesterday! thank you my dear british friends!

 

Pre-9/11, but does mention other tragedies, including the World Trade bombing.

 

Not strictly about 9/11, but William Basinski's Disintegration Loops are linked to that day.

Basically, during the late summer of 2001 he was digitising old analogue tapes of synth experiments, but the tapes were in a bad way. By looping some of these tapes he hoped to keep some of the music, but the very act of playing these loops caused the tapes to disintegrate further - this was duly captured digitally and the results are astonishing. The music itself falls apart, distorts, crackles, becomes more hazy and gappy, as the tapes themselves died. It's also very, very beautiful.

On the morning of 11 September 2001 Basinski had some friends over to listen to the results on the roof of his New York building, and they had clear view of the Twin Towers as they burned and fell. The covers for the Loops are taken from video footage shot from that rooftop and although the music was created before the appalling events of 9/11 it's impossible to hear this melancholy, stately, gorgeous music that is fading and dying before your ears, without thinking about that day.

The day after the Parisian atrocities, this was the only music that I could conceive of playing.

What a horrible, senseless mess this world seems to be sometimes.

 

He's been listed many times already, but here is my favorite. " Your'e Missing" from The rising on solo piano rehearsal for SNL

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and second favorite, my city of ruins from 9/11 benefit
From downtown manhattan, thoughts are with those in paris

 

Eagles - Hole in the World.

Can't find them performing it on You Tube but it's on their Farewell 1 Melbourne Concert 2 DVD set and now BD too.

I was never quite the same after that day..........
I hoped that SOMETHING would be learned from it but here we STILL are...

I also had a Sting DVD called "All This Time" which was a small concert he performed in Italy on the day..........it was VERY flat..


From Wikipedia.....

...All This Time is a live album and concert film by Sting, recorded and filmed on 11 September 2001. It was recorded at Sting's Villa Il Palagio in Italy in front of a select audience drawn from his fan club and features live versions of Sting's songs from his Police and solo song catalogue. The album and video get their name from the song of the same name from his album The Soul Cages.

As Sting wanted to put together a concert in his home, he enlisted a group of musicians to practice and perform this concert with him. The events leading up to the night of the performance were filmed, and within these events on the day of the performance, the September 11 attacks perpetrated against The United States of America occurred, and the assembled group of musicians was made aware of this. The group performed the concert as originally intended, although Sting indicates on the DVD documentary the tone of the evening was quite different from how it was originally intended. Additionally, the "Desert Rose" performance featuring vocalist Cheb Mami was canceled due to the same circumstances.
As a result of the tragic events, the concert was dedicated to those who lost their lives that day. Inside the CD booklet, upon the first page, is stated, "This album was recorded on September 11, 2001, and is respectfully dedicated to all those who lost their lives on that day." Thereafter, the lyrics for the included song "Fragile" are also transcribed; of the full song list comprising the CD, only the lyrics for this one song are within the booklet.

 

Chilling emotional performance recorded in New York a few days after 9/11. Not written about 9/11 but the context makes it so.

 

Saw her not long after in London, O Superman was harrowing.

This is the hand, the hand that takes,
Here come the planes
They're American planes. Made in America.

 

It's been mentioned already a few times, but 'The Rising' album by Springsteen is one of the most important albums of my adult life. I can vividly remember listening to it upon release, and with a fairly young family at the time, feeling moved in a way that really registered with me.

According to Wikipedia: "While most of the songs were written after September 11, 2001, a few of them pre-date the attacks. It's been rumored that Springsteen got the inspiration for the album a few days after the 9/11 attacks, when a stranger in a car stopped next to him, rolled down his window and said: "We need you now." Springsteen also told this story to journalist Mark Binelli in the August 22, 2002 issue of Rolling Stone".

 

"O Superman" is one of my desert island songs. In my all time top ten for sure.
I have little idea what it's actually about, and frankly I don't really care - for me it sounds like the soundtrack to a post apocalyptic world, music that would suit a nuclear winter. In the 1980s, the era of Threads, When The Wind Blows, the first tv screening of The War Game, there always seemed like a chance that Reagan or Russia would push that big red button and that would be it. "O Superman" seemed to me to be the music from the end of the world, chilling, but also devastatingly beautiful, haunting and haunted.

 

Rush "Peaceable Kingdom" from "Vapor Trails" (Original Mix)

 

Camel, For Today

 

Ryan Adams' video for New York, New York was shot on Friday, September 7, 2001. It's sort of a goodbye to a romance, but lines like "Farewell to the city and the love of my life, 'cause we left before we had to go" were eerie for a while and the song could get me choked up. Eventually, though, it became more uplifting and seems more like a love letter to the city.

 

Phish "Walls Of the Cave" has long been rumored to be about 9/11. The album it came out on was dedicated to a fan killed that day.

 

Aloha E - Jesse Colin Young

 

Not about, but the opening track of The Concert For New York, performed before thousands of exhausted and hurt firefighters and NYPD. Not from his personal repertoire, but appropriate Simon & Garfunkel.... counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike, they've all come to look for America.