Tower of Songs

Illustration by Sam Weber.

In 2001, nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks destroyed New York City’s Twin Towers, George W. Bush made a momentous speech to a joint session of U.S. Congress. “Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom — the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time — now depends on us,” the president said. “Our nation — this generation — will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.”

One night later, a broadcast coalition led by ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC aired America: A Tribute to Heroes, a star-spangled benefit for victims of the attacks and their families. The telethon, which raised more than $150 million US, began with a long shot of New York’s skyline that turned to Bruce Springsteen and a choir stock still on a candlelit stage. America had its ready avenger in Bush. Now the Boss channelled its hurt. “This is a prayer for our fallen brothers and sisters,” Springsteen said, introducing his song My City of Ruins.

There’s a blood-red circle
On the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church door’s thrown open
I can hear the organ’s song
But the congregation’s gone
My city of ruins
My city of ruins ...

He’d written the lyrics a year before, moved by the economic decay of his adopted hometown, Asbury Park, N.J., although he had yet to record them. With slight changes, the song became a near-perfect fit for the devastation of the Sept. 11 attacks.

During the telethon, Springsteen, accompanied by his own guitar and harmonica, sang as a man who had been bowed but not broken. His eyes seemed black and heavy. He did not (could not) raise them from his microphone through the refrain: “Come on, rise up,” repeated seven times. A call on high followed — Springsteen is a lapsed Catholic, though his catalogue teems with Christian imagery — sung in rounds with the others.

... I pray for the strength, Lord (With these hands)
I pray for the faith, Lord (With these hands)
We pray for your love, Lord (With these hands)
We pray for the lost, Lord (With these hands)
We pray for this world, Lord (With these hands) ...

Toward the end, the choir dropped away. Springsteen finished alone — softer, stronger than before. “Come on, rise up/Come on, rise up/Come on, ri-i-i-i-ise up.”

It would take more than a concert to deliver America’s catharsis — the healing continues today — but My City of Ruins gave reason to believe it could happen.

Bruce Springsteen opens the live broadcast of America: A Tribute to Heroes in September 2001 with the song My City in Ruins.

During the five years since 9/11, U.S. musicians of almost every kind have responded to the attacks through song. None, though, has matched Springsteen’s gift of The Rising, released in July 2002. The 15-track meditation ranks among America’s finest artistic statements on the event and its aftermath. My City of Ruins appears at the album’s close, a capstone on 72 minutes of pain, grief and redemption.

The Rising was Springsteen’s first album to be produced by someone outside his fold: Brendan O’Brien’s prior credits included work with Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam and Korn. The album, though, is closer to gospel than hard rock. For most of its songs, Springsteen assumes the voices of ordinary people who have been marked by loss. He sings about the emergency services and office workers who perished when the World Trade Center crumbled to earth, and the loved ones they left behind.

Days after the attacks, with the wreckage of the Twin Towers still smouldering, Springsteen took his family to church — an unusual thing for him to do. “We were in there with the rest of the wannabes, and it was jammed. But I found that to be very valuable. People just wanted to be with other people who were addressing issues of faith and hope and love,” he said to Rolling Stone in the summer of '02. That experience, coupled with an encounter with a stranger who yelled, “We need ya!” from a passing car, moved Springsteen to make The Rising. “That made me sense,” he told the magazine, “like, ‘Oh, I have a job to do.’”

Springsteen started writing two songs — they’re both on The Rising — before his appearance on the Tribute to Heroes telethon. (And then played My City of Ruins because neither was finished.) “Children are asking if it’s all right/Will you be in our arms tonight?” he asks in one, called You’re Missing. The other, Into the Fire, is penned from the perspective of a firefighter’s surviving companion: “I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher/Somewhere up the stairs into the fire.”

A delicate vocal treatment is all that keeps The Rising’s title track (and first single) from feeling as if it came from the score of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie: the countrified backbeat borders on cloying. But the Boss carries his listeners back through time and space, into the smoke-clogged stairwells of the WTC. “Can’t see nothin’ in front of me/Can’t see nothin’ coming up behind/Make my way through this darkness ... Lost track of how far I’ve gone/How far I’ve gone, how high I’ve climbed.”

(Sony Music Canada Inc.)

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Springsteen supported military action against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan — a measure that was designed, in Bush’s words, to “smoke” Osama bin Laden and his fighters “out of their caves, and get them running.” The left-leaning rocker, though, has since become an outspoken critic of the White House’s “War on Terror.”

Throughout The Rising, Springsteen offers a more complex, considered reaction to 9/11 than the Bush administration’s “dead or alive” militarism. Worlds Apart, a semi-saccharine tale of distant lovers, draws on Middle Eastern and African influences, praises “Allah’s blessed rain” and features backing vocals by a Sufi choir. And Paradise is an even greater surprise — it’s sung in the style of Into the Fire, but written in the voice of a suicide bomber who waits to die and join his soulmate in the afterlife.

I sink 'neath the water cool and clear
Drifting down, I disappear
I see you on the other side
I search for the peace in your eyes
But they’re as empty as paradise

Considering the surge in American xenophobia that followed the attacks, it’s a startling — if slightly overwrought — attempt at empathy.

The Rising debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and sold more than 750,000 copies in its first two weeks. It was Springsteen’s first collection of new material since 1995, and reunited him in the recording studio with the E Street Band for the first time since 1984’s mega-selling Born in the U.S.A. That album was about Springsteen’s disaffection with Reagan-era domestic policy. The Rising is an exercise in communal healing from foreign attacks. (“Come on, rise up!”) Four years after its release, with bin Laden still at large and the War on Terror raging on, its music remains as vital now as it was then.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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