Maybe I'm so in love with The Suburbs because it came at the perfect time in my life.
--
Arcade Fire's third studio album The Suburbs was released on 2 August 2010, a Monday. I don't think I purchased it until that Saturday, though. I remember Danielle had worked the nightshift on Friday, so when she came home with the car that Saturday morning, I drove to Best Buy and she went to sleep.
I unwrapped the packaging (the Best Buy in Hartsdale only had one of the 8 different covers, so I didn't have to make any tough choices there) in the car and put the CD on. I was familiar with the eponymous first track, as it had been released earlier that summer along with "Month Of May," the album's tenth track.
The two songs were an odd marriage, which, probably not coincidentally, are an apt description of AF's music overall--loud and soft, sweet and sour, gentle and brash. The songs were intentional though. They highlighted the fact that neither represented the album as a whole and were intent on laying the ground rules for what the extremes of the album would be.
We just didn't know that then.
--
After completing "Ready To Start," probably the album's most free-standing track, I figured I should probably drive home. By the time I'd pulled into my parking space, I'd made my way through maybe two or three more songs. It hit me that as soon as I went inside, I wouldn't be able to experience any more of what was already obviously an outstanding musical performance, as my midwife fiancée was asleep inside after spending the night delivering babies.
(I've got this thing--I don't like experiencing albums for the first time wearing headphones. I'm a sonic range guy, and no matter how good your headphones are, they will never compare to a pair of well-placed speakers.)
After spending five minutes debating sitting in the car for 50 minutes to finish the album, I went inside.
My first listen of The Suburbs was hushed--one volume notch on my computer's audio level, huddled close, following along with the lyrics, my pointer finger keeping the lines straight.
(I should, at this point, take the time to explain that in August of 2010, I was two months away from getting married, a certain amount of time that I don't remember--more than a year and a half at least--into quitting smoking, eating right, and exercising frequently, if not obsessively, and generally moving away from a mental state that could be described as precarious to stable. I'd graduated with an MFA in fiction almost two years prior and was still forcing myself to tell people I was a writer, rather than an administrative assistant. I lived--live--we live, where I work--on the Manhattanville College campus in Purchase, New York. A big zip code for not so big incomes, but for two kids from The Bronx, the quiet is deafening in all of the best ways, even if from time to time it is a bit--intimidating.)
(Out the front door of our building, maybe fifteen steps, is a field, maybe 200 yards across, until the residence halls across the way. Danielle and I, in the two ((three?)) years we've lived here, have taken to "sitting out," a practice that followed us north, the best kind of childhood nostalgia, no longer on the front stoop of our homes in the big bad crumbling definite article-preceded borough, now facing out on what is, to us, an expanse that offers--peace? Is that what it is? In the summer, and in the spring, and in the fall, we sit in our fold-up chairs and I can't speak for her, but I know that I sit and I fight the urge to say something. I feel it. I have it in my mouth, the feeling that comes right before I say--something, but then nothing comes out. And that felt wrong at first, like realizing I was grinding my teeth. I can't speak to what I'm feeling, because it is only expressed in the sounds around us, sounds that I'm sure you could guess what they are, and the feeling.)
(And there is always the sense, not that I've "made it," because making it means an ending has been reached, but that this is where I'm supposed to be right now. It takes a long time to reach that place. 26 years in my case. But when you realize that not everybody does it that quickly, and that, shit, some people never reach it at all, you take the time to inhale it and watch it and stich it into your memory and maybe smoke a cigar or two in celebration. And I could bore you with our conversations about the meaning of happiness and how it isn't about finding what it is that makes you happy, but instead, taking the time to realize that you already are happy, and making peace with the this-is-as-good-as-it-gets factor. But this was supposed to be a review of The Suburbs, and is instead becoming a review of the suburbs.)
--
So this birds-are-chirping, you-are-exactly-where-you-should-be state is where The Suburbs entered my life and promptly became the soundtrack of said life.
I took these pictures during one of our "sitting out" sessions that August, as we re-played The Suburbs again and again through our tiny cell phone speakers:
When I posted them on Twitter, I captioned them "She was shocked in the suburbs" and "He was shocked in the suburbs," paying tribute to what should be a throwaway spoken-word line in the beginning of "Month Of May," but what has remained for me as one of the defining moments of the album.
Watch Arcade Fire perform, especially tracks from The Suburbs. Tell me they aren't soaking it up, even if they're playing whatever track they're playing for the umpteenth time. They are smiling, basking in the glow of musical composition, the celebration of a time and a place.
As we watched their Grammy performance last night, Danielle said, "It just looks like they're having fun," and while she was right, I don't think she realized the depth of her comment.
Just have fun. Youth sports. Little League. Bike riding (think their stage design was a coincidence?). Simple. Nostalgia.
The mistake I made was thinking that once one manged to wrangle happiness, it would remain there, submissive. But it doesn't. Just like The Suburbs, it ebbs and flows, has loud moments and quiet moments, and eventually, ends.
But then there is the living--for those ups and downs, for those moments like at the end of their "acceptance speech" last night, which was really just Arcade Fire's Holy Shit, We Really Won? sputterings, when Win Butler said:
Thank you. We're gonna go play another song--'cause we like music.
Like somebody and a million others once said, "Just go out there and have some fun."
And then there are the words echoed on multiple songs on The Suburbs, at first triumphantly displayed, and then whispered by the end:
Sometimes I can't believe it/I'm moving past the feeling/Again
That notion--of not being able to believe in something you've already experienced, but that you know you will likely experience again--it sticks with you. The meaning changes each time, maybe because the music plays in your head, or maybe because you bring something different to it each time, but it stays.
As I said earlier, maybe I'm so in love with The Suburbs because it came at the perfect time in my life. And maybe you shouldn't trust this as a "review" of the album, because I'm obviously one biased motherfucker.
Or, maybe you should believe me.
Maybe I really was exactly where I was supposed to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment