64x30: Brooklyn Vegan Comment War?

There's a good review of Arcade Fire's new album up on Brooklyn Vegan. However, some of the comments were less than charitable. It got me thinking about how hard it must be to make music for millions of people you haven't even met. I mean, I have a hard enough time writing a song that means something to both myself and the woman I wrote it about. So it must be really difficult to write songs for, say, everyone who lives in any suburb, everywhere, as Arcade Fire have to do now.

On my current superalbum, 64x30, I'm trying to write sixty-four songs in sixty-four days. I don't expect that anybody but me is going to love all of them. Actually, I myself hate certain aspects of each of them, even though on the whole I love them each as if they were my own children. If I were spending sixty-four days recording one perfect song, I wouldn't put out a song with a little piece I didn't like. But I feel like that's what I do in most bands I play with, and now I'd like to try the opposite. My goal now is that, by the end of the album, anyone who listens to the whole thing will be able to find one or two songs that they completely relate to. Maybe they won't understand half of the other ones at all, but they'll be able to point to one or two and say, "that's my song. That's what I feel like."

So this is a song that's not for the commenters at Brooklyn Vegan, although along with Walt Whitman I love them as though they were myself, this is a song that's for Arcade Fire to relate to, and say, "yeah. if you took all the negative stuff people in just one community can say about an album we just spent years working on, well, you could write a pretty good song."