“It’s a mess”: The song that took Arcade Fire years to perfect
An orchestral feel-good indie rock song rarely has stains of its sweat, blood and tears audible in the final product, but they were always there in the back end.
When a song has as many elements as this Arcade Fire masterpiece, you’ve got to crack a few eggs to make the omelette, and when the song took over four years to sit right with its authorship, you know it would have stirred a few headaches.
The first thing to strike the listener is how ‘No Cars Go’ has no definitive subject matter, which is when you know there’s a special story in your ear. The song unfolds like a dream, where its triumphant, cinematic choirs elevate the abstract lyrics into a thunderstorm of mystery as the listener yearns to know where they are being taken. The repeated motif “We know a place” invites an eclectic buildup aided by a spectral string orchestra and echoed lyrics, as the mystery is never revealed: where is the place that no cars go?
Originally recorded for the Quebec-born band’s 2003 EP, the song is finally re-imagined for their 2007 album Neon Bible. Arcade Fire’s drummer, Jeremy Gara, opened up to Popmatters about the decision to re-arrange the song.
He said, “We had a new studio space and all this new gear, so we just needed to start with something that was easy for us to play so we could get used to everything else”. They started with the now beloved hit, since “’No Cars Go’ had changed so much on tour from how we originally recorded it”.
As real as indie bands can be, Gara explained candidly, “The version on the EP is cool, but it’s a mess, and the version we had been touring with was way more of a straight-up rock song”.
The initial release of the song garnered a lot of popularity, to the point where it became a live staple. It was guaranteed to build up momentum and get the crowds involved, and the more they played it, the more they got it air-tight, with Gara adding, “There was always talk of redoing it. And now that we had more of a budget, we wanted to record it with the string arrangements that Regine had always envisioned.”
Regine Chassagne, the band’s co-vocalist and co-songwriter, definitely had a magnificent vision: the orchestral element elevates the song to embolden the speculative hypothesis where the lyrics are leading their audience, intimating a hazy idea that the place where no cars go is some kind of afterlife.
While many didn’t understand the reason for its re-inclusion, its appearance on Neon Bible was definitely necessary to uplift the general cynical mood of the album. Its easy sing-along quality makes it as classic an Arcade Fire song as can be, with its multi-element detail just infusing it with the ‘mess’ that got it up and running in the first place. Fox Sports went on to muddy the soiled waters by using the song during its Super Bowl and 2007 season’s coverage, without the band’s consent, but that whole mess is a story for another day.
