What Means the World to You: 2015 in Musical Memories
October: Arcade Fire — “Reflektor”
Running a marathon is not so unlike the experience of living daily life. Over and over and over you wake up, have coffee, go to work—work—go home, decompress, talk to some people, eat, get tired, put on pjs, fall asleep. Within each cycle there is variety, but the basic loop—human days attached on end—is inescapable. Each mile of a marathon is kind of like one of those days. It could be smooth, painless and downhill, or hurt the whole way through. All you know is that mile 26.2, impossibly far away, is technically speaking the end, and you don’t know exactly how things will play out before you get there, or how long it will take.
Whether or not the experience is horrible or worthwhile depends on whether or not you’re able to recalibrate your brain for the long haul. It can no longer be, “When is this going to be over?” It has to be, “Ok, this is going to last some unknown, long period of time, but I’m in it till the end.” It is only this shift that lets you move forward, because you choose to believe that sticking it out will teach you things about yourself and life that you don’t currently see or understand. Otherwise, that was a lot of time and pain for nothing. So, as mentioned—living successfully is kinda like running successfully for a really long time.
Two years ago in October, I ran my first marathon in Minneapolis. Arcade Fire’s Reflektor had just come out. Actually, the album hadn’t even come out yet, just the single. On my way to the airport in New York I downloaded the song on my phone. The plan was to make a long playlist to listen to as I ran, but I didn’t get very far. “Reflektor” was one of the only entries that made it. Miraculously, it turned out to be the sonic equivalent to running the race. As the miles passed and my pain grew steadily greater, Win and Régine were in my ears, singing fragments to each other about the bizarre, unknowable nature of their long-term love—how they fell in love when they were only 19, and could never have known or predicted what that relationship would look like well over a decade later when they were still married, still in a band together, and now reflecting back on it all, trying to gain some understanding about who they were together and separately after all this time.
The song varies wildly as it progresses. It speeds up and slows back down, and turns corners, and dives into drastically-different-sounding sections the whole way through. Like running the race (and living), it is singular, strange, and long. The climax stretches practically to the very last bar, and it’s by far the best part. No other piano chords have ever made me run faster, and definitely not after so many miles. It is the rich reduction of the entire song—made better because you’ve lived and listened to every part that came before it—and it’s over sooner than you want it to be.
This October I returned to Minneapolis to run my second marathon. I stuck “Reflektor” in my ears again and, pretty much immediately—because my running mind was trained to and with this song—my brain had a Pavlovian response to the very first notes. I was committed for the long haul. And even more quickly this time, the race was over.—Natalie Rinn