Live released V on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 attacks. Their fifth studio album had grown out of loose, experimental sessions, but its arrival was overtaken by events outside the band. “Overcome,” written before the attacks, was already being paired with images from New York.
In a 2010 account on his blog, guitarist Chad Taylor traced the project to a break in the tour for The Distance to Here. The musicians recorded at a friend’s house in Los Angeles, with drums on the patio and guitar amplifiers in the living room. They worked quickly through ideas Ed Kowalczyk had developed on the road, concentrating on capturing the songs rather than perfecting each part.
The working title was Ecstatic Fanatic, and Taylor said the material was intended as a giveaway. MCA pushed for a formal album release instead. The finished record opened its main sequence with “Simple Creed,” which paired Kowalczyk with Tricky. The British musician contributed vocals and shared the songwriting credit. Marc Webb directed its video, alternating the band’s outdoor performance with a confrontation that ends when one participant walks away. Tricky appeared on a television screen within the clip. This was the album’s planned introduction, before another song began circulating with footage the band had never commissioned.
Other songs had already reached audiences through films. “Deep Enough” appeared in The Fast and the Furious, while “Forever May Not Be Long Enough,” written by Kowalczyk and Glen Ballard, accompanied the closing credits of The Mummy Returns. Both films opened before V reached stores. Those placements gave the material a public life while the album itself was still waiting for release.
“Overcome” reached television through a different route. Filmmaker Steven Rosenbaum assembled footage his crews had captured around Ground Zero and set it to the song. The first version was made independently of Live and aired on VH1 and MTV in the days after the attacks. The musicians encountered a new context for a recording they had already finished, with images of the destruction replacing the usual performance footage of a promotional video.
Rosenbaum recalled the band’s response in a 2011 interview with Beliefnet. With his edit already on television, he expected a call about having used the music without permission. Instead, Live’s manager told him the band was honored. A further conversation became more difficult when the group wanted to use the footage for a video shot in Los Angeles. Rosenbaum insisted that Kowalczyk should come to New York. The singer agreed and flew east, joining the filmmaker and his wife near Ground Zero.
They approached the area with a boom box to play the recording, but access was restricted. A small group was allowed through while the larger entourage remained behind. “He left behind all the handlers, all the agency people,” Rosenbaum recalled. With the ruins still smoking behind him, Kowalczyk sang “Overcome” a cappella. Footage of his visit was incorporated into a revised version of the video.
