Rebuild America

REBUILD America [Single never before released]

Music and lyrics by Ed Hale. Guitar and Vocals: Ed Hale. Background vocals: Ed Hale, Fernando Perdomo. Lead guitars: Fernando Perdomo. Piano and keyboards: Jon Rose. Drums: Ricardo Mazzi. Bass guitar: Roger Houdaille. Recorded at Dungeon Recording Studios. Miami, FL 2001. Produced by Ed Hale, Fred Freeman. Engineered by Fred Freeman. Mixed by Fred Freeman.

Go to YouTube to watch video for this song. It’s awesome. And you can download the song from iTunes or amazon.com. The band is donating all proceeds from the sale of the song to the Robin Hood Foundation to help Sept 11th victims’ families.

Feedback from fans has always been very positive on the song since we first put it out there. So when compiling this album we felt like it was about time to finally give Rebuild America a permanent home; we also had received a lot of requests from fans to officially release the song so they could buy it and own it. So we decided that if we were going to release the song that we should not make any money from the song ourselves but instead give all the revenue from the song to a charity that supported the families of the victims of September 11^th and the NYPD and Fire Department and Rescue Workers. After some research we decided on the New York based Robinhood Foundation who had done such an excellent job at raising money and mobilizing financial support for the tragedy so quickly after it happened. Robin Hood Foundation has committed to giving all the proceeds from the sale of Rebuild America to a special fund that they still have setup for 9/11 victims in need, whether they be firefighters or their families or even some of the actual people who survived that event and who are still in need of medical attention. We are very thankful to the Robin Hood Foundation for what they have done over the last seven years. Our goal is that the song raises a truckload of money for this cause. So even if people only buy one song as opposed to the whole album, let it be this one. And feel free to gift it to as many people as you have the money for. It’s a damn good cause and one that many people have forgotten about the last few years. But there are still needs out there pertaining to the September 11^th attacks. TRANSCENDENCE is donating all proceeds from the sale of this song to the Robin Hood Foundation. If you like the song, feel free to buy a few and send them out to your friends. Let’s commit to selling a few hundred thousand of this song as a way of helping some people who are still in need.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001 TRANSCENDENCE singer/guitarist Ed Hale was at a school in Costa Rica when he heard the news. [For more backstory, see the “news section” from 2001 of the band’s website] The rest of the band was in the recording studio laying down basic tracks for their new CD — what was to eventually become the Sleep With You album.

When flight restrictions were finally lifted, Ed flew back to the States and into the studio to resume work on the album. But first Hale played the band a new song he had written the days following the catastrophe on September 11th. The song was called Rebuild America. They quickly recorded the song, each laying down their own tracks one by one and finished the entire song that first night. Because the song did not fit the content or format of the Sleep With You album – for fans familiar with the disc, this is obvious —- it wasn’t placed on that CD and was never formally released. Instead it floated around the Internet and sat on the band’s “unreleased songs” page of their website for years.

Interestingly, it was the band’s webmaster G2, while browsing “viewing stats” of the band’s website who noticed that the song was receiving a lot of “clicks” and plays from that page though it had never been released or even publicized that it existed. Another event that propelled the band to actually do something about the never before released track was that they would occasionally receive emails from Fire and Rescue Workers from around the country who wrote to say that they “really liked the song and send their buddies the link to listen to it.”

The most recent email the band received about “Rebuild America” was from first response emergency rescue worker Matthew Tartaglia from Perkasie, PA who worked at the World Trade Center site for two months straight after the attacks. Thank you for your email Matthew. So after six years the band decided it was time to get the song out there, and the fastest way to do that was through YouTube. Why not make it showcase the victims and the heroes through photographs.

Bassist Roger Houdaille commented, “Rebuild America was the first song I ever tracked with TRANSCENDENCE. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the songs we were recording at the time like Superhero Girl or Minnie Driver, but I knew Ed was really into us recording it because of what happened and all. I think it’s still one of our strongest tracks so I’m glad that we’re at least putting it out there.”

“The way this song came together was amazing,” stated drummer Ricardo Mazzi, “the cause was much greater than the need of creating music or art, it was larger than that. And we all knew it. The fact we’re talking about 9/11, remembering fallen heroes, calling for unity in our song is an honor to me and I have this band to thank for it. Everyone put their heart and soul in this song and completed their parts rapidly but thoroughly, from the tracking, recording, mixing, and mastering.”

Hale commented, “Rebuild America is a hard song for me now, just because of everything that we have seen come out in the last four or five years since September 11th. It’s hard to know what really happened that day… what we do know is that a lot of innocent Americans died. And you know that’s why we recorded the song. That’s why I wrote it. When you listen to it now you can really hear the optimism of what it felt like those first few days after September 11th. I mean, you can feel the patriotism of the song, which is so different than what we feel in the air now in America. So the song is hard for me now. I was really amazed how the whole country came together those first few months to rebuild. You know? And now with the invasion of Iraq… it’s just hard to know what to feel. I still like the original idea of the song itself. And I like the idea of turning it into a video, just to celebrate how people came together those first few months… and to mourn the loss of the lives of those people who died that day… those were different times… But the song captures that.”

Indeed Rebuild America may be one of the most emotional songs the band ever recorded – every player contributed something unique and passionate and brilliant of their own to the song’s touching and poignant message. The fact that the band is so associated with activism now and the song has such a patriotic feel to it makes it a slight anomaly in their catalogue to be sure. But as the band members freely admit, it was recorded just after the days of 9/11 when the world was a different place and America was in a different place entirely. So for the first time ever they decided to officially release the song as a photographic slide show in honor of the victims and the rescue workers of that momentous time in American history.

Ed Hale’s personal notes on Rebuild America — 2008

I wrote Rebuild America on the morning of September 11^th, 2001 in a hotel room in Costa Rica. I was alone. Just me and my guitar. I was enrolled in a summer immersion class there to become more proficient in the Spanish language. The band was actually still recording the Sleep With You CD back home in Miami. I cannot express with words adequately enough to represent the pain and isolation I felt being at a school in another country hundreds of miles from home during that time. The song Rebuild America was nothing more or less than just a pure catharsis to help me release the pain that I was feeling over what I had witnessed on the television that morning and the following days. It was also an attempt to try to turn things a bit more positive in my heart and head and bring hope and inspiration to the scene. When I got back I played the song for the guys and we all agreed we had to record it. So we dedicated one of our recording nights on the album to tracking this entire song.

Our producer was a little baffled as to what this song had to do with the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll focused Sleep With You album. But due to the nature of the song he never gave us a hard time about us taking up that night to record this baby. He just let us do it and never charged us for it even after finding out that it would NOT go on the Sleep With You CD which he was heavily invested in. I played the song for the guys once. They learned it right there on the spot and five minutes later we were recording it. This song also represents the very first song Roger recorded with the band as he had just joined when we started the Sleep With You project. We tracked the entire song, instruments and vocals, and sound effects in about six hours. Jon even came in with a hard drive filled with recordings of actual sounds from the events of that dreadful day so we embedded those in the background of the song to make it that much more real and authentic. I think that all of us were very inspired by an unspoken need to record the song and get it out to people. Fred Freeman who was producing Sleep With You mixed it over the next few days and that was that. We didn’t feel comfortable putting it on any album. Especially Sleep With You. Both would have been compromised. So we just put it up on the band’s website so fans could stream the song and listen to it as much as they wanted to for free.

Lyrics

I saw the planes crash into us

I saw the people cry

I saw the buildings come crumbling

I saw the rescuers sigh

I saw ht president weep

On national TV

I saw the volunteers sweeping

To clean the New York city streets

As we try

Yes we try

To rebuild America

The land of our fathers

The land of our mothers

America

We are not alone

As we try

Yes we try

To rebuild America

The land of our fathers

The land of our mothers

America

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