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Album: Reflektor (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This Post-Punk song starts with a clip from Arcade Fire's 2007 performance on Jonathan Ross's BBC talk show when Win Butler smashed a camera live on television with an ukulele. "We have fantastic music from the fantastic Awcade Fiyah," introduced the famously 'r'-challenged chat show presenter.
  • This is one of several tracks on Reflektor where there's a dance-music influence. Win Butler told BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe that it was the album's co-producer, LCD Soundsystem mainman James Murphy, that provided the band with a guiding path for their more rhythmic direction. "If you can get James tapping his foot," Butler said, "you know you're on the right track."
  • Arcade Fire had the first ideas for Reflektor when playing a gig in rural Haiti, which led the group to making a more dancier album, Win Butler explained to Rolling Stone: "You're playing for people who have never heard the Beatles before. In rural Haiti, they've never heard 'I Want To Hold Your Hand.' They've never heard Elvis. So if you don't have any of this kind of context of rock & roll, if you just play a song, what makes it connect? There's the rhythmic elements of the songs and the emotion in the vocal — you're able to really connect with people that you don't share language or a common culture with."

    "You know, 'Headlights Look Like Diamonds' is on our first EP and that's pretty much like a New Order dance song, and New Order is probably one of our biggest influences from the beginning," Butler added. "That's one of the things we always connected to with James Murphy. LCD to me is like New Order and the B-52s and we deeply share a lot of those influences, and we did completely different things with it. Régine (Chassagne, bandmate and wife) is kind of the person who dances. At any given minute, if you can get Régine to dance, you're kind of on the right track, so I think we just wanted to make a record that Régine could dance to."
  • Jonathan Ross re-enacted his epilogue on stage with the band during their performances at Coachella and Later Live... with Jools Holland.
  • The music video was filmed and directed by Win Butler. As the band perform the song in a sun-lit bedroom, the camera pans to various pink-eyed framed portraits who come alive and lip-sync to the track.

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