I remember first hearing “Wake Up” sometime in the middle of my freshman year of high school. Those forceful opening chords and near-euphoric shouts forming a soundtrack to a confusing mess of a year: wandering between classes and buildings, slipping through crowded hallways, dodging the unzipped mouths of backpacks spilling class handouts into the walkway. This was 2009, five years after the band’s breakout release of the debut album Funeral (more significantly for me, four years before I would learn to drive), and every mundane moment of adolescence was now infused with the orchestral grandiosity of “Wake Up.” Never mind the fact that I still hit the snooze button on my alarm five times in a row most mornings, or that I spent most car rides to school in a groggy stupor, NPR on the radio, my mother charitably silent.
“Children, wake up!/Hold your mistake up!/Before they turn the summer into dust,” Win Butler sings, and the stakes of Funeral immediately become clear. They—adults, the wise, old, and ominous father figures that appear throughout the album—threaten to lull the children into comfortable blindness. “Wake Up” draws its listeners (my 14-year-old self included) from that comfortable morning languidness into a state of celebration and clarity. The strings hum, the bass thrums. Chords layer over one another to reach euphoric heights.
Yet even as the sounds draw the listener upward, the lyrics themselves offer a more sobering view of lifetimes to come. Funeral’s attempts to grapple with the state of adolescence position it as the natural precursor to the darker, less idealistic Suburbs. But where Suburbs captures the malaise or stagnation that comes with age, Funeral poises itself at a threshold. The narrator in “Wake Up” alternates between associating himself with the children he addresses and retaining a wiser, jaded distance. On occasion he speaks collectively, reminding listeners that “our bodies get bigger, but our hearts get torn up,” but he frequently returns to the first person, acknowledging that “now that I’m older/my heart’s colder.” The narrator, like his audience, wavers freely between two states. This threshold, “Wake Up” suggests, is itself a cause for celebration. Amidst the mentions of rainstorms and rust, a symphonic harmony continues in the background. The epiphany that “Wake Up” aspires to is not any grand declaration: instead, the song consumes itself with the almost imperceptible internal transition between childhood and adulthood.
The turn of “Wake Up” between the second verse and the outro shifts from orchestral grandeur to playfulness. Régine Chassagne, in a sweet, cloying melody, repeats that “with my lightning bolts a glowing, I can see where I am going.” It is this clarity—the delight that comes with glimmers of self-knowledge—that I most strongly associate with listening to “Wake Up” in the beginning of high school. It’s hard, I think, to capture the paradoxes of being a 14-year-old, aware of one’s own smallness, and both eager and terrified of becoming big. But the conclusion of the song offers its minor comforts. The uncertainty is okay; the uncertainty is the first motion towards a quiet, clear lucidity. I can see where I am going.
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