Song of the Week: We Used to Wait

“It seems strange
How we used to wait for letters to arrive
But what's stranger still
Is how something so small can keep you alive.”

SPOILER ALERT! BEFORE YOU READ ANY FURTHER, go here: http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

I’ll wait…

More accurately, it’s a song of last week. I spent, like MOST of last week messing around with this thing, typing in different addresses, but nothing compares to the feeling when you realize where those birds are flying over, what you are about to see.

The first time the little runner slowed down and looked around near the first place I lived, I really did feel like that little person. It opened up some writing floodgates.

A friend of mine said that on his film, it clearly showed that his treehouse had been dismantled. Such a perfect example of the rich loss and wistfulness.

Back to Thinking About Space: I think that I might have a little different slant on The Suburbs than others might. Whereas on this album and in other works of art (The Virgin Suicides, Weeds, Douglas Coupland novels) the suburbs always represent a sort of decadent desolation, they seemed like the opposite to me. I grew up in a very rural area, like I said yesterday, so moving to the suburbs was, to borrow a phrase from a semi-shy friend, socially overwhelming. It was liberating in that I could walk to the library, but scary because there were so many people around. (It’s similar, I guess to my still-current feeling of moving from a small city to a big one.)

Every Arcade Fire album is a different way of looking at the end of the world. This particular apocalypse is my favorite because it’s the most lyrical. And because it’s causing me to write a mountain.