Wake Up

I don’t really identify with music. I mean in the sense that I don’t use music to attach to specific meanings or feelings. Lyrics are like instruments in that I couldn’t tell you what the words are or what they meant any better than I could tell you what the guitar or drums are saying. Everything comes together in rhythm and melody in a way that I enjoy.

Every now and then, though, a song will ingrain itself into my brain and become completely linked to a particular point in time due to repetition.

When I was a teenager, I collected comics. I bought the twelve issue series of Watchmen, which by the early 90s had already had multiple printings. While I read it, I’d listen to music on my Compact Disc player. I had maybe a dozen CDs at the time including Paula Abdul’s Spellbound featuring QSound technology, and Phantom of the Opera. Clearly, I am a man of impeccable taste in music.

The album I listened to on repeat, though, while reading these engrossing comic books was Soul II Soul’s debut album, Club Classics Vol. One. To this day, any time I hear Back to Life come on, I’m instantly transported to my teenage bedroom, the afternoon light coming through my window, as I sit on the floor, wondering what Dr. Manhattan would do.

After that, it wasn’t until March of 2009 that another song would create such an intertwining to an indelible moment. The song was Wake Up by Arcade Fire. While the song had been released in 2004, I first came across it when it was used in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are—a book I had and enjoyed reading when I was a child and that I enjoyed reading to my kids, then 5 and 1½.

My wife (at the time) and I were in the process of adopting our third child. Unfortunately, it never came to pass. We had gone through failed adoptions a few times before and the reason this time was no different than those other times: the mother chose to keep the child—a perfectly reasonable, respectful, and honourable decision.

Perhaps because I had been more open about this attempt, the failure hit me hard. (Failure doesn’t feel like the right word here. Nobody failed. It’s nobody’s fault. Circumstances changed.)

Wake Up was played on repeat.

To this day, 16 years later, whenever I hear that song, I’m brought to tears.

Somethin’ filled up
My heart with nothin’
Someone told me not to cry

Now that I’m older
My heart’s colder
And I can see that it’s a lie

That failed adoption precipitated events that led to my asking for a divorce three months later.