September Haze

I was 21.

The weeks after the towers came down, I lived inside the perimeter at Ground Zero as a volunteer. We slept on the gym floor at Stuyvesant High School. We breathed what was in the air because there was no other air to breathe. We walked streets that were, in the song's words, holding death. And every door we walked past in lower Manhattan was open.

It took me about twenty-five years to write this song. Some songs you can't write until enough time has passed that you can finally see them. September Haze is what I saw when I finally turned around and looked.

It isn't about that day. There are plenty of songs about that day, and plenty of films, and books, and memorials. This song is about the weeks that came after — the part most people who weren't there don't have a picture of. The part where lower Manhattan was figuring out how to keep going while everyone in it was holding someone else's grief. The part where strangers handed me coffee and told me to sit down. The part where every meal came from someone who didn't know my name.

But every door had a light turned on Strangers saying, "Son… come on" Coffee cups and a place to stand Softest hearts in a shattered land.

Softest hearts in a shattered land. That's the line the whole song is built around. I needed those people to know — twenty-five years later, in the only way I knew how — that I remember.

The song addresses lower Manhattan directly. "You held the line. With trembling hands and borrowed time." That's how it actually felt. The city was a person. Not a metaphor — a person, with hands, doing the thing a person does when there's no other choice. It held. It gave coffee. It opened doors. It kept the lights on so anybody who needed somewhere to stand could find one.

The bridge of the song carries the line I held back the longest:

And though my lungs still carry it all And some nights I still hear the call — What I hold through the years and miles Is the love in a million trials.

The lungs aren't metaphor. Anybody who was inside the perimeter carries something physical from those weeks. That's just true. But the song isn't about the carrying of the damage. It's about what else got carried. The kindness. The names. The faces on the missing-person signs that I walked past and never forgot. The voices I still hear sometimes — in subway sounds and distant noises and the way silence falls in certain rooms.

I put this song sixth on the album because it needed to land in the second half, where the listener has been with me long enough to receive it. Clearwater Nights is, at its heart, about the moments that taught me who I was. This is the heaviest one. I had to grow up enough to be able to write it.

I'm not asking listeners to do anything with this one except sit with it. If you were there, you'll know. If you weren't, you'll feel something in the spaces between the words that won't really translate but doesn't need to. The song carries its own weight.

This song is for lower Manhattan. For the strangers who handed me coffee in the worst weeks of my life. For Stuyvesant High, where we slept on the gym floor. For the names I still carry. For every door that was open and every person on the other side of it who refused to let any of us be alone.

Love was louder than all the pain.

Still echoes. To this day.

— 01DW3ST