The Year in Music - The Arcade Fire

Okay, one last discussion of music, and then I'll move on to other things. In a way, I feel like I should have quit with that last post about Belle and Sebastian, insofar as it completes an arc from sorrow (The National) to regret (The Tallest Man on Earth) to redemption (B&S), but life rarely organizes itself that tidily, and neither, it turns out, do blogs.

This summer, along with The National, I spent a lot of time listening to the new Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. The Arcade Fire, in case you don't know, are a band from Montreal led by the husband-wife duo of Win Butler and Regine Cassagne. Win's brother Will is also in the band, making them, like The National, a band of brothers - in this case tremendously tall brothers who hail, originally, from Houston. Also like The National, they released what was widely praised as their best album last year, although where the former are understated and morose, these guys are bombastic. The Suburbs is a concept album about, well, the suburbs - growing up in them, leaving them, missing them, and coming back to them. It's a deeply nostalgic album, and, while I don't really think it's their best (I prefer the weird opacity of their first album, Funeral), that theme had special relevance for me this year.

One of the things that happened when Joey died was that suddenly my childhood became a private, rather than a collective, memory. My parents remember my childhood, of course, as do my other relatives and friends from that era, but Joey was the only person whose parents were also my parents, whose childhood home was also my childhood home. He stood in roughly the same position as I did to all of the events and things of my childhood - the trips to our grandparents, the imaginary world of our stuffed animals, the summer afternoons watching the Cubs or the Braves, the birthday parties (our birthdays are two weeks apart), the Christmases, and so forth. Suddenly I am the only one who knows what it was like to grow up in that family, in that place, at that time. And that's a very, very lonely feeling.

And so I listened to Win and Will Butler sing about their childhoods in suburban Houston - neighborhood wars, endless summer hours, aimless drives, malls stacked up like mountains beyond mountains - and I thought of our house at the end of a cul de sac on the edge of Oklahoma City, with the sunken living room and the treehouse fort, and I let myself feel what I'd lost. It's not just childhood itself that's gone - I've long accepted that - but now the only person who could fully corroborate my childhood is also gone. I'm left holding all these memories that have no independent existence outside of my own head, and if I drop them, they're gone for good. It's a bit like having all of your most precious data - your most important emails, your honeymoon photos, your favorite songs - on a single hard drive, with no way to back them up. One spilled drink, one short circuit, and you've lost it all.

I think the Arcade Fire song that most fully evokes that nostalgia for me is "Wasted Hours." It's one of the album's quieter songs, about long summer days in a place where "first they built the roads, then they built the town." It reminds me of the summer when I was 10 or 11 (Joey was 6 or 7) in which we spent entire days in Joey's bedroom (where the Nintendo was) trying to beat Super Mario Brothers 2 with his friend Chauncey, a kid who lived down the street. On those days we'd be fueled entirely by breakfast cereal and chips and salsa (though not simultaneously), getting painful thumb divets from the Nintendo controllers and becoming bleary-eyed as we sank and lurched on Joey's soft-springed bed. It was either that summer or another one that we also wasted many days, and probably weeks, working our way up the levels of Mike Tyson's Punch Out!, a game that requires infinite patience and determination to a) learn the pattern of each (increasingly difficult) opposing boxer, and b) put your knowledge of those patterns to use with your (increasingly aching) thumbs. We finally did it, though, and once you've done it, you don't have to do it again. Here's the song:

Last August, my friend Judith and her boyfriend Aidan came down to Nashville from Indiana to see the Arcade Fire play at the Ryman. Judith's niece is dating the band's drummer (honestly), so she was able to get us on the guest list, which meant free tickets and backstage passes. This was just about a month after Joey's accident, when I could hardly think of anything else, and I remember having to suppress the urge to text him from the show in order to make him jealous. It was a good concert, energetic and fun - one of the guys in the band (not the drummer) spent much of the time flailing around like a Muppet (as Kate observed) - but mostly I remember watching the two brothers on stage, doing their thing, being rock stars together.