Help Us Understand

I’d picked the week of September 10, 2001 for a solid week of writing songs, and got off to a good start on that Monday. However, then 9/11 came, and most any thoughts of anything else went by the wayside. A day or so later, some friends convinced me that, as a songwriter, it was more or less my duty to try and write something to express what others might not be able to, so I tried. After a day or so of trying to come up with something, though, I just couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t seem trite. I resolved I’d give it another day, then overnight just got thinking about my whole reaction to the event at that point in time. The next morning, the basic idea for this lyric just spilled out, and the song was finished within a week or so total. An early demo was played on the radio in a small town over in Australia, and the song was also sung at a vocal recital by a young singer over in Germany, both back in 2001. This recording was produced in 2011 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

Songwriter(s)

Rick Paul

Credits

Performed, produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered by Rick Paul.

Cover artwork by Rick Paul, based partly on a copyright-free FEMA photograph by Andrea Booher.

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Story Behind the Song: “Help Us Understand”