My roommates are getting high underneath the Bob Marley sarong in our living room. It’s already dark, and in 8 hours I have to get on a plane. Our internet was down for the day, and upon its heroic repair, I indulged in the obsessive kind of googling that only interests me in the first 10 minutes of the internet being a novelty. This urge only hits me after long internet-free periods, like cross-country roadtrips or sojourns to the amazon jungle. And this google adventure led me to the Pitchfork Media reviews of two different albums that I have listened to fairly obsessively, one for an entire summer and one for the week I’ve owned it, The Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible and Stars‘ In Our Bedroom After The War (Stars pre-released it on the interweb, but I am not savvy to these things. I would much rather just buy it and play it on my cd player. The internet makes me uncomfortable.) And it led me to thinking about both these albums, which I never would have contextualized together but which contain some shocking similarities. (To me, not to the universe. They are really only similar in their adherence to the concept of an unspecific but definite overall thematic idea, and their theatricality.) (Oh yeah, and they’re both Canadian.) I am only describing one, because I have to get on a plane early in the morning. On both cds, I consider Track 2 to be the best song, and I don’t think anybody else cares. Track 2 on Neon Bible is ‘Keep The Car Running.’ You would think it would be impossible to capture the intense emotional intricacies of driving across America in your first car, a week after getting your license, with 3 of your favourite people in the entire world. The sun is setting over Arizona and your tires are driving miles and miles to meet your roommates in Indio, California for your third Coachella Festival. You will spend weeks, stopping at towns that rise clapboard and neon out of the desert, eating at bizarre Mexican restaurants where people walk in between the tables selling beaded earrings, drinking beer staring at the setting sun over the Grand Canyon and throwing rocks off cliffs in the painted desert. You will sleep at dawn on a picnic table. You will arrive 5 minutes before Andrew Bird’s surprise set at Amoeba, and drink Mexican hot chocolate. You will drive for hours outside L.A. fueled on Rockstar until you find the only campsite still open, and when you wake up you are beside a beautiful mountain. You will smoke cigarettes and talk about love until four in the morning outside your friend Joanna’s house in the Oakland hills, and when you stand up to go to sleep the San Francisco city skyline will be over your shoulder. You will arrive home and it will be summer and you will drive a thousand more places, with a thousand more people, in a thousand more contexts, and it will all sound like this song. It is a very, very good song. Track 2 on In Our Bedroom After The War is ‘The Night Starts Here.’ This song is like life: it’s about a lot of things that have already happened to me, but it’s really about something that hasn’t happened yet at all. This is the most important song on this album, and I don’t care what anyone says.  AND NOW, The Playlist That Makes the Fact that I Have to Spend an Hour and a Half on the Bus and Skytrain to Get to School Enjoyable: 1. Suenos Dulces-Thunderheist (the bass in this song is so filthy I can’t get enough of it. it is extremely difficult, also, not to say “THUN. DER. HEIST.” out loud in daft punk voice whenever I listen to it.) 2.Take Me To The Riot- Stars (the video for this song is about my friends, if we met someone outside a bus station and took him dancing. we have never drunkenly frolicked in lake ontario, though. it is too far from downtown.) 3. The Way I Are- Timbaland f. Keri Hilson and DOE 4. Ms. Hill- Talib Kweli 5. Over and Over- Hot Chip (somewhere in rolling stone magazine, someone said something about how no one had ever heard this song sober, and at the time i read it, i had heard the song at least a hundred times, and it was totally true.) 6. Stronger- Kanye West f. Daft Punk (Kanye was all, ‘I’ma wear some stunna shades and talk over the coolest song ever written. and he does this awesome snarl thing in the video that makes everyone wish he was on them. he’s Kanye West, dude can do whatever the fuck he wants. i love robot helmets.)  7. Lovely Allen-Holy Fuck (this is the most beautiful song ever. i want to be buried in this song when i die.) 8. The Night Starts Here- Stars 9. 1 2 3 4-Feist (the first time I heard this song was at Olympic Island 2006, Feist was wearing a straw hat and talking about lighthouses while the sun was slowly making it’s way towards the skyline. Loveliness.) 10. The Beginning After The End- Stars 11. Paper Planes- M.I.A (mmm. she performed it in sequined shorts at Lollapalooza, it thumped out of an art car that drove by at 8 in the morning at Burning Man, and everytime I was like ‘i have to find that song and listen to it always.’) 12. We Are Your Friends- Justice vs. Simian (this is the funnest song to dance to drunk ever. i want to get drunk and dance to it right now.) 13. This Is The Way We Live- Baby Boy Da Prince (da prince!) 14. Young Folks- Peter, Bjorn, and John (this song has been stuck in my head for an entire year. by listening to it, i cut out the middle man. plus, if i listen to it on the bus, i am made out of paper.)