A New Tune

Album titles mean something different in the new context: The week after the attacks, Dreamworks artists Jimmy Eat World ditched the title of their latest album, released July 17. It is no longer called Bleed American. Even entire albums sound different, none more so than U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind, now a year old. Almost every song off that record sounds as though it could have been written on September 12: "Walk On" ("Who will only fly, fly for freedom"), "Peace on Earth" ("Tell the ones who hear no sound/Whose sons are living in the ground/Peace on Earth"), "New York" ("Irish, Italians, Jews and Hispanics/Religious nuts, political fanatics...living happily not like me and you"), "When I Look at the World" ("Can't see for the smoke/I think of you and your holy book"). "Beautiful Day," once a hit single accompanied by a video filled with airports and overhead jets, resonates on a different frequency. Little wonder that U2, which performed during the September 21 America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon and last month at Madison Square Garden for three sold-out nights, has been the house band at the world's largest and longest wake.

In the days and weeks immediately following the attacks, the music industry scrambled to eradicate any vestige of songs and images that might rekindle the televised nightmare. Clear Channel issued to its 1,200 radio stations a list of songs to be excised from the playlist; some were obvious (Dave Matthews Band's "Crash"), some were ridiculous (John Lennon's "Imagine"). Hip-hoppers The Coup were forced to redo the cover to their album Party Music, on which band members were depicted "detonating" the World Trade Center. The Cranberries pulled a video full of images of airplanes, skyscrapers and the chalk-mark outline of a corpse, and Dave Matthews rethought the decision to release "When the World Ends" as a single. The Strokes deleted the song "New York City Cops" off its disc Is This It, which was already out in Europe. "Not only did we not want the release of our record to be overshadowed by some, like, quasi-political event, but we felt it wasn't really appropriate," says Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi of the band's decision to pull the song.

But beneath the shadow of perpetual fear--our leaders try to calm us and call for us to return to "normal" even as they warn of impending attacks--music provides a balm and a tonic. The aforementioned songs, among so many older ones hauled out by Billy Joel or Paul McCartney or Paul Simon during various benefits and tributes, give us release: They let us cry, they make us smile, they take us away, they bring us home.

"A lot of people are now asking me, "What's your role as an American artist?'" Merchant says. "I think I can give expression to thoughts and feelings that ordinary language can't. It's a heightened language of the emotion. It makes me cry, it calms my rage, it gives voice to my rage."

For a little while, Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World had the hardest time playing the gorgeous "Hear You Me" off Bleed American; it is, he reminds, a song "about death and loss and the ultimate regret of not being able to change something and leaving things unsaid." But after a while, he needed to play it, to sing such lines as, "On sleepless roads the sleepless go/May angels lead you in." And during Wilco shows, just after the attacks, Jeff Tweedy could be heard thanking the crowd for coming to make music with this band--"especially now," he always added.

Pop music for the longest time has felt hollow, cynical, bereft of honest emotion; it has become "our floozy," as Merchant likes to say, "a cheap whore." There have always been musicians making meaningful art, but they've been too long relegated to the sidelines; they don't top the charts, don't play TRL, don't get on Saturday Night Live. Perhaps recent events will change all that: What, after all, does Britney Spears' new album, out this week, have to offer save for more songs about why Britney loves being Britney (and why you should, too)? She and her ilk have always seemed trivial and superfluous; now, Spears exists in a vacuum, a fantasyland of silicone and hair gel.

"There's a lot of ego in music," Pernice says. "I write songs about what I'm feeling, and I spend time putting out product about my feelings. It's a really self-centered thing, and events like what happened in New York make me take stock in my own life and get a grip on what the word "meaningful' means. It changed everything."