Home
We look to music for any number of reasons: to provide release, joy, solace, understanding, and to help articulate feelings we can't always express. What songs or melodies could possibly comfort us or help us comprehend the attacks of Sept. 11? Our music staffers thought they would use this space to write about the records they did (or didn't) listen to in the weeks after four hijacked jets ripped into our known world.
DAVID BROWNE
On Sept. 8, I bought a new stereo receiver and, naturally, began grabbing favorite albums to hear them in richer high fidelity. But three days later, no activity felt less important. When I was finally ready for music, I needed to hear voices, as many as possible. I wanted to experience something sacred and omnipotent: the sound of people rising up to decimate evil, the devil, something. So my stereo returned to life with gospel songs featuring massed choirs: the Edwin Hawkins Singers' ''Oh Happy Day,'' the Staple Singers' ''Wade in the Water,'' Ricky Skaggs and the Whites' ''Talk About Suffering.''
Others were secular, and it didn't matter: Be it Foreigner's ''I Want to Know What Love Is'' or Leon Russell's ''Stranger in a Strange Land,'' I wanted to be engulfed by as many fervent voices in union as possible. Melanie's ''Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)'' never sounded mightier or more cathartic. One of the first albums I'd cranked on my revamped system, Beck's deadpan Mellow Gold, was not missed. I wonder when -- or if -- I'll return to it.
JEFF GORDINIER
Neil Young wrote ''Helpless'' in New York, but it's full of longing for some mythic Canadian countryside, ''a town in north Ontario'' with ''big birds flying across the sky'' and ''blue blue windows behind the stars.'' As far as you can tell what any Neil Young song is about, ''Helpless'' seems to be about the serenity of retreat, or maybe, like ''Sugar Mountain,'' the lost paradise of youth. I don't know and I don't especially care, because to me the music makes any explicit analysis of the words feel kind of small. The music is what the song is ''about'' per se: the weary fade-in, the drowsy drop of fingers on a piano at 4 a.m., that watery shimmer right before the last verse. I suppose it's odd to draw strength from a song called ''Helpless,'' a song about giving up, but in my mind I still need a place to go, and that's what it sounds like.
TOM SINCLAIR
Windswept anthems and misty-eyed ballads are all well and good, but when I find myself in times of trouble, I reach for the first two Clash albums. Years ago, The Clash and Give 'Em Enough Rope provided the soundtrack to the war inside my head. Now that there's a real war going on, their strident anger and militaristic imagery seem frighteningly to the point. The music is some of the most devastating rock & roll ever recorded. But it's the lyrics that keep bringing me up short: ''Hate and war/The only things we've got today''...''A system built by the sweat of many/Creates assassins to kill off the few''... ''And I like to be in U.S.A./Pretending that the wars are done....'' Many critics have pointed out that the Clash's putative political agenda never really added up. That may be true, but one can now almost believe Joe Strummer and Mick Jones were punk-rock Nostradamuses, predicting our terrifying present-day reality more than 20 years before the fact.
