“Crown Of Love” hooked me from the very start, with a driving, edgy chord progression that continues essentially unchanged from verse to verse except for the voices that are continually added to it throughout the song: first, drums and an out-of-tune piano provide a skeletal promise behind Win Butler’s ghostly narration. They’re soon joined by a sparse string section and light guitar, both wandering in accompaniment behind frontman Win Butler until he reaches the energetic climax of the song: a not-as-surprising-as-it-should-be “double time” that brings us home.
This sudden change of pace nearly four fifths through “Crown Of Love” would be out of place nearly everywhere else (except, strangely, “Wake Up,” the very next song on the album, where the same technique is repeated), but here, it’s simply the fulfillment of an energy that’s been building the entire song: the chord progression becomes so musically saturated that suddenly playing it twice as fast doesn’t seem out of place.
It’s hard to follow the building emotional tension so present in the music of this song without letting it spill over into the lyrics. I really like the way American Songwriter‘s Jim Beviglia put it in an article last year:
“Crown Of Love” is perhaps the most monumental deep track on the disc, an impassioned lament for lost love that keeps hitting stunning musical heights while the protagonist sinks to unfathomable depths.
The music gets higher as our protagonist gets lower. We hear him pleading “you gotta be the one, you gotta be the way, your name is the only word, the only word that I can say,” but we just can’t stop tapping our feet and bobbing our heads.
This is the question Arcade Fire confronts us with: can loss and heartbreak be part of a larger emotional picture? Can they be subsumed within a more complete musical landscape? Listening to “Crown Of Love,” it’s hard to say no. And for the sake of its narrator—lost in a world without the one he loves—I can’t help but hope that it eased the pain.
