I’m on the road again. I’ve refined my theory around mountain music, and found that it cleaves naturally into two broad categories: desert and forest. In the desert, I like to listen to what one might consider cowboy tunes, like George Harrison, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan. In the forest, the winding roads and walls of green surrounding me, I find myself gravitating more towards more modern rock, with less emphasis on acoustic guitars—Arcade Fire, U2, Sharon Van Etten. I haven’t really driven along a coastline for any extended period of time, but if I had to guess, I’d be drawn to something that felt like fog and rocky shores, maybe Fiona Apple or Madeline Kenney.
I listened to The Suburbs (2010) and Funeral (2004) today on the first leg of my drive. I tried multiple times before, but couldn’t get into Arcade Fire until early pandemic. I listened to Funeral religiously on the bike rides I took to pass time, and songs like “Wake Up” and “Crown of Love” got baked into my brain. I made this playlist in April of 2020, when the days seemed like they went on forever. I latched onto “Crown of Love” because it begins with one of the strongest opening verses I can remember:
They say it fades if you let it
Love was made to forget it
I carved your name across my eyelids
You pray for rain, I pray for blindness
This song is an early example of what would become Arcade Fire’s signature: strong narratives supported by lush instrumentation. The band tours with guitars, drums, basses, pianos, violins, violas, cellos, double basses, xylophones, glockenspiels, keyboards, synthesizers, French horns, accordions, harps, mandolins, and sometimes a hurdy-gurdy. The members switch instruments throughout shows. Win Butler and Régine Chassagne share vocal duties, which is unique for a modern band. Also, they’re married.
For a debut record, Funeral is groundbreaking; it holds a record for the most appearances on end-of-decade Top 10 lists, second only to Radiohead’s Kid A (2000). Critics recognize that Arcade Fire changed indie music forever with this album. Funeral sounds rather squarely alternative next to records like Punisher (2020) or Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017), but in 2004 when it debuted, it was completely unlike anything being made at the time. Britpop bands like Oasis and Blur were fading out of mainstream popularity while modern rock bands like the Strokes and Interpol were coming up. Arcade Fire rushed in to fill a rapidly narrowing gap, which later blossomed into an entire sub-genre.
“Crown of Love” closes with these lines:
Your name is the only word
The only word that I can say
Spoon is one of the groups whose later work, especially Hot Thoughts (2017), is traceable to Arcade Fire. The two bands toured together in 2010, in support of The Suburbs (2010), the highly anticipated second Arcade Fire record. The next Spoon record following that tour was one of their best, They Want My Soul (2014), an album that cemented their place as an indie darlings, paragons of good time rock. Hot Thoughts brought back their more brooding side, with electronic elements woven throughout its jangly piano and guitar driven sound.
“Tear It Down” features whirling ambient noise, whose usage was perfected most recently by Phoebe Bridgers on “Garden Song,” and instrumentation soaked in reverb, like the whole song is being played in a warehouse. The album art, an abstract watercolor skull, reflects the juxtaposition between the spooky and beautiful on the record.
I chose the final song on this album after watching Twilight (2008) early on in the pandemic with my housemate. Robert Pattinson has been known to regale the soundtrack of that film, and I have to agree with him; “Roslyn,” the collaboration track from St. Vincent and Bon Iver, is a masterpiece, as is “Flightless Bird, American Mouth.” Kristen Stewart personally chose it for the prom scene in the movie. It could be interpreted as a song about lost love, redemption, or childhood, but I’ve never been interested in its definitive meaning so much as the grief behind it. I love it as the closing of the first Twilight film, and as the closing of this playlist.