Ocean of Noise

Album: Neon Bible (2007)
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Songfacts®:

  • In an interview with the New Musical Express December 8, 2007, the interviewer asked about this song and Arcade Fire's fascination with the power of the sea. Multi instrumentalist Wim Butler explained: "My parents live near the ocean and we've gone there quite a bit over the history of our band. It's really isolated there by the ocean. I remember one time we went out on the 4th of July. It was dusk and we had a little motorboat, so we went out and the fog was starting to roll. We stopped and all of a sudden we were surrounded by fog. We had no idea where we were. And there was a fog horn. It's like you're never less in control of your own life than when you're in the ocean underneath a big wave and there is fog all around you. You can just see that you're a passenger in a weird sense. Things are out of your control. It was just that kind of feeling that I wanted to express."

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