Driving Rain was complete and the album artwork was finished when the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center happened – experienced firsthand by Paul McCartney, who was sitting in a plane on the tarmac at JFK International Airport. He wrote “Freedom” for the Concert for New York City and performed the song with Eric Clapton. The popularity of the song prompted him to add it to Driving Rain with some added studio overdubs, so Capitol Records halted the release of Driving Rain in order to include it, without updating the album artwork. A sticker was added to the album mentioning inclusion of the song.
After performing the song on his 2002 US tour, McCartney declined to perform in on his subsequent 2005 tour. “I thought it was a great sentiment, and immediately post-9/11, I thought it was the right sentiment. But it got hijacked. And it got a bit of a militaristic meaning attached itself to it, and you found [President George] Bush using that kind of idea rather a lot in [a way] I felt altered the meaning of the song,” and later added, “Mine was in the spirit of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ you know, ‘fight for your rights,’ in the Civil Rights sense, doesn’t mean ‘Go out and hit people.’ It was a pity: it kind of stopped me doing it, actually.”
How to find it: Go directly to track #16
Submitted by: EAM
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That’s not just a shitty JPG. The cover photo was taken with a 2001 watch camera 😆