A friend gave me a copy of Arcade Fire’s debut Funeral in a stack of ripped CDs shortly after the album was released. It happened one ordinary morning as I was walking to catch the bus for work, not feeling terribly inspired. I pushed play on my iPod. Just 3 ½ minutes later: transcendence.

Since forming in 2001, Arcade Fire quickly distinguished itself as an exceptional talent. With four trailblazing albums under their belt, it’s timely to reflect on Arcade Fire at 15 years. From the beginning, the oversize band had the ability to craft distinctive, fully engrossing albums and to perform these live in ways that capture their music’s intensity and intimacy.

Arcade Fire has successfully evolved its sound with each release while producing consistently great songwriting. In this respect, they’ve joined an elite group of groundbreaking artists including U2, Radiohead, Talking Heads, and Bruce Springsteen, whose influences have been melted down in the band’s own cauldron.

For fans and the unconverted alike, I’ve selected Arcade Fire’s 15 best songs, sequenced chronologically. Taken together, these make it clear why an unlikely band from Montreal attained global acclaim. While it’s more than we have any right to expect, to quote a favorite Arcade Fire lyric, “us kids know” their musical journey is far from complete.

It feels like just yesterday that school was out for summer. As the calendar flips from July to August, this time of year can create a nostalgic and reflective mood about what it’s like to go back to school.

At Feed.fm, thinking about back to school led us to the quintessential high school flick The Breakfast Club. The movie is hard to forget because it so perfectly captures something universal about the different cliques that American teenagers can find themselves circling.

In The Breakfast Club, we meet Brian (The Brain), Allison (The Basket Case), Andrew (The Athlete), Claire (The Princess), and John (The Criminal). As music lovers, we asked ourselves what music each of these archetypal characters was listening to as they went back to school in 1983, several months before that fateful day they met at the library. Then we fast-forwarded 30+ years and imagined their life’s soundtrack today.

Your guess is as good as ours in terms of what happened to each of them following detention and what became of their lives. However, we feel reasonably confident the following music would be found on their playlists…both then and now.

We’ve all read and heard a lot about Prince’s musical legacy over the past week. And deservedly. From the time of his debut album in 1978 until his untimely death, he was a pathbreaker who lived up to the somewhat grandiose (albeit temporary) nickname “the Artist.”

A Blast from the Past for the Very First Time: Thoughts from the Santa Clara Dead Show – Saturday June 27, 2015