Music

Read 9/11 memories from Sonic Youth, David Byrne, Incubus, and more

by Nicole Villeneuve

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centers in New York City, and media outlets are shining even more light on the decade that’s passed in the city since.

The New York Daily News has collected stories from notable NYC musicians such as Sonic Youth, David Byrne, and Regina Spektor, plus the one band that didn’t immediately cancel their post-9/11 NYC show, Incubus, about the days that unfolded after.

“The studio of seminal New York guitar band Sonic Youth lies so close to ground zero, the FBI found a piece of a doomed plane’s engine smoldering on the building’s roof.” Guitarist Lee Ranaldo lives just two blocks north. “We were just about to take our two year old to his first day of pre-school when the thing started to happen,” Ranaldo says. “My wife heard the plane crash into the first tower. So we turned on the news. At first it seemed like just another crazy day in New York, so we kept going about our business. Then the second plane hit.”

Byrne says that the impact will last forever. “In those first days a heightened sense of brotherhood and humanity arose in a ‘heartless’ city like New York,” he says. “All the structures put in place by governments were gone and people just helped each other. Anyone who felt it, will never forget it.”

Read the full stories over here.