On this minor key piano lamenting change and modernization, frontman Win Butler revisits the town where he grow up. "I took a drive into the sprawl to find the house where we used to stay in," he recalls. However, Butler fails to locate various childhood haunts that are imprinted on his memory.
Arcade Fire's brothers Win and William Butler spent their formative years in The Woodlands, a suburb of Houston, Texas. In preparing to write The Suburbs, Win and his wife and band colleague Chassagne travelled to The Woodlands in the summer of 2008. "It was kind of a bummer," Chassagne told Q magazine April 2012. "It was interesting to see that the people make the places, and when the people are gone, the places are still there but they're not yours."
Driving around The Woodlands at night, the couple were pulled over by the local police for, "suspicious activity." The incident is detailed on this track. "It was a really strange experience, even before the cop incident," Butler told Q. "My parents moved away seven years ago. I no longer knew anyone there. I was like being a tourist, a strange mix of knowing exactly where I was and also feeling completely alien… A lot of the songs on The Suburbs are very much myself now looking back at that time, but also trying to put the pieces together, to reconnect with those feelings and those emotions before they're gone completely."
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