The first time I heard Arcade Fire and Funeral, I cried.

That’s the sort of thing that would be considered cringe, both before the advent of Funeral and again a little while after it again. Feeling real, earnest emotion from a song is antithetical to the experience of being a fan of alternative, or indie, or whatever you want to call it today. Ironic detachment is what sells it: Nirvana embodied the alienation of the latter half of Gen X; can you imagine crying to a Pavement song? Maybe “Zurich Is Stained.” Now, again in an era that seems uncomfortable directly connecting with its inner self, the earnestness of Arcade Fire once again seems hokey. Even the band seems to feel the same way. After three albums of wearing their hearts embroidered staunchly on their sleeves, they came out in 2013 with Reflektor, itself a brilliant album but one that explored alienation, the internet, and becoming detached from who and what you were before.

At any rate, when I’ve told that story, I have most of the time come up with various explanatory variables, little excuses for doing something as gauche as crying. It was a hard time; I always think of it as winter even though it clearly wasn’t. I was going through major life changes. I was young and desperate. The root is, though: I heard a song I felt a connection to, and it effected me emotionally. The key thing that Arcade Fire seemed to be saying in the fall of 2004 was that’s okay. It was music meant to be connected with emotionally. It wasn’t something you put on to seem cool to some girl you were trying to score with. Oh look at me, I know the Beta Band. It was built to bring you into its embrace.

Funeral is an album about coming together. Much has been said, negatively and positively, about its penchant for wordless choral chanting, it’s sprawling number of musicians playing at the same time. It’s less the work of a rock band than of an orchestra. It doesn’t encourage audience participation – it demands it. Other bands tried that in its wake – Most Serene Republic, I’m looking in your direction – but it was rarely, if ever duplicated. They weren’t just a disparate group of musicians playing for themselves on a stage, either. There was a sense surrounding the album that they were tight as hell, and early videos of their concerts bear this out. Here is 15 minutes they did at the Rivoli in Toronto in 2003, when the band was just another local act with an EP they were hawking.

Look at how much fun they’re having. Look at how together they are, despite the constraints of the venue and the sound quality of the video. Look how much the audience is drawn into their manic joy.

God, look how young they are. It’s all such a mess now, thanks to the usual male bullshit in the age of the reflection, thanks to growing up and falling into the very trap Win Butler warned all of us about. But look how young and vital and goddamned alive they are there. It’s absolutely no wonder they went on to conquer the world.

There’s a comment under that video that says a lot, for me.

“I was in school in London Ontario at the time, deep in the rave scene, but I remember the buzz the band had at the time. I remember hearing they played a small club called Call The Office. Lots of people I knew went and came out like they had just witnessed a religious experience. I remember hearing about how hard, and with how much passion the band played. Their energy certainly had a massive impact on whoever saw them during this time.” – StereoAnthony

The audience connected. It would be the first Billboard 200 charting album for Merge Records and would outsell their previous top album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, by a wide margin. It became a hit, and then it became a movement. Journalists began digging into Montreal to find other bands; it’s a whole scene they said, although they moved on quickly enough afterward. This, of course, is where I mention that you should listen to Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone by The Unicorns. As usual, the backbiters and the recriminators would gnash their teeth about being unable to follow-up their hit. They did, of course, setting out on a three-album run that rivals any other band in history, for me. Funeral is the top, though. Personally, maybe even critically. For some, Exile On Main Street. For some, OK Computer. For some, Songs In The Key Of Life. For me, Funeral.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter how many times I hear it, whenever I hear the line “I GUESS WE’LL JUST HAVE TO ADJUST” melt into the wordless chant that underpins “Wake Up” I am an absolute mess – tears streaming, screaming at the top of my lungs (see also the peak of “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)).” It’s deeply cathartic. By 2004, it you were paying attention, the gig was up. We weren’t going to do anything about climate change, no one cared when it was the time to do something. Bush was being re-elected, wars were going down in the Middle East, the surveillance state was in full swing, neoliberalism was entrenching itself and eating us alive. The song’s message – Jesus Christ, kid, don’t grow up, growing up is a trap, people die and things are on fire and you can’t let the bastards get you down – resonated with all of us, I think. It was a dicey time. It has only gotten dicier since.

That wasn’t the song I first crumbled to, though. That would be “Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)”, that contends with the mortality of the people we love and uses metaphors of childlike wonder and despair to share the grief in that mortality with those also effected. The desolate loneliness in the lyrics – Then we think of our parents? Whatever happened to them? – strongly informed my first novel, Disappearance. One of the characters sings the line about digging a tunnel from my window to yours as they wander into the teeth of a screaming blizzard near the end. It’s sadly out of print now thanks to the vagaries of the publishing industry but if you see this and email me I can probably see fit to send an electronic copy your way.

The title of the album is not meaningless or ironic, of course. There were three deaths in the band’s families between June of 2003 and April of 2004, and the sorrow of these losses is a major motif in the songs. Funerals, though, are about togetherness as much as they are about grieving. Indeed, to get through grieving, you need togetherness. They are a coming-together moment, especially between family and friend groups that don’t always get to see each other all the time.

My father-in-law recently passed suddenly, and we were left with the unenviable task of going through the house of Boomers who kept things often out of a strange, hazy combination of nostalgia and inertia. Between the funeral and the time, two weeks later, when we managed to stop and say “good job so far, most of the work is done”, we saw so many people. An insane amount of people. We threw parties, at the beginning and the end, to commemorate being together. We cooked, we played music loudly, we said hello to people we dearly loved that we don’t get to see anywhere nearly as much as we’d like to. I was reminded constantly of Funeral: from sorrow, togetherness,; from grief, a way to spread the healing among all of us.

It marked a moment when we, all too briefly, decided that was okay, as a culture. I said above that it carves out an era, one that ended sometime between 2010 and 2012, where earnestness was a thing that would get you somewhere. It was the golden age of folk punk, of bands like Against Me, of Springsteen revivalism and bands like the Gaslight Anthem who wanted to infuse that sense of everyday hero honesty into their music. Then opiates crashed over the continent and we became numb again, culturally. Funeral is the exact opposite of that numb detachment. It wants you to chant along to pure melodies, it wants you to weep as you do it, but it wants you to understand that these are both perfectly normal things to want. Let the walls come down. You don’t have to polish it for Instagram. Just be honest, tap into your emotions. Be real.