…Then what’s it for? I have imagined what life will be like after death. My nightmare is that it will be infinite church meetings, with an infinite playlist of traditional church hymns listed out on the wall with the black and white plastic number placards. I was trying to spend some time outside the house today, a sunny Sunday morning, and I rolled out of bed and dragged myself to a coffee shop. Not being a morning person I was relying on a subdued sanctuary where I could humanely nurture my nerves to some level of public presentation, sipping down one delicious Red Eye. I soon noticed that one person was actually sitting next to another and speaking. Soon followed by another, then another, then another, and so on. (Ironically, it was an ex-mormon recovery group.) What we had was ultimately a boisterous congregation building to a fossil fuel drilling operation in the tender wildlife preserve of my morning. That’s when I assembled my personal sound system and ignited my copy of the Arcade Fire “Reflektor” record – and where I got the idea for the title of this post.

I heard and got hooked on a song from Arcade Fire a couple of years ago, “We used to wait.” It was really catchy, but I didn’t feel the same about the rest of the record. Somehow I can’t commit to a band on a single song – I need to feel the soul, continuity and payoff of something that spans a full LP record. There are those in my life who keep a collection of one or two songs total from each band and they flip through a random playlist. That’s fine, no complaints, but it’s actually kind of jarring to me to jump around hodge-podge. More on that later, but when I recently gave Arcade Fire another shot, I was blindsided by a deeply moving experience. They were part of the quirky, brilliant and rewarding 2013 YouTube Music Awards show, with a live music video that culminated in a group of cute young girls hopping around to “Afterlife.” I haven’t felt so unexpectedly happy like that in a while and I hope heaven is taking notes.