A tribute to the September 11, 2001 tragedy in the United States will come in the form of a two-disc C.D. set that will be released next month.

Composer/pianist Jake Heggie, who lives in San Francisco, created an album dedicated to the stories of survivors who lost loved ones in the attacks, entitled, here/after (songs of lost voices) and will give those Americans a chance to speak out. He said that the album’s purpose is to “create a sense of hope and newness that can come from the grief. Otherwise, the people who did it win.”

Heggie also recently spoke of his reasoning for the album’s birth: “A dozen years later, stories continue to emerge, evolve and yearn to be told.”
Since he lives on the West coast, Heggie collaborated with Grammy-nominated New York songwriter Gene Scheer, to conduct interviews. However, not a single person on the album hails from New York; and for a reason.

“I wasn’t in New York, I didn’t see the smoke and destruction, and yet my life changed that day – everyone’s life changed that day,” Heggie said. He also elaborated on this sentiment, reasoning that while those living in Manhattan, obviously, felt a stronger sense of grief than those without firsthand experience, there were so many more people hurting elsewhere that didn’t get license to grieve in the same way that New Yorkers’ did.

A Texas firefighter who went to New York to sift through the ruins in the days after 9/11 contributes to the album with lyrics, “And everything belonged to somebody/To somebody gone/And we all belonged to each other/From that moment on.”

here/after (songs of lost voices) is set to be released nationwide on October 21 by PentaTone Classics.

Image courtesy Timothy Krause on Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.