Creature Comfort

I see this song as an indictment of the current culture of America and the idea that we all just "standing in the mirror and wait for the feedback" from others. We either want the approval of strangers (to be famous) or we want to numb ourselves with our creature comforts (a painless life). Finally, all of this seeking approval and creature comforts is just noise to cover up the fact that each of us is in pain and will one day die. The song also pokes fun at the emptiness of American prosperity--we don't know what we want, and if/when we get what we want, we aren't sure if we want it. Arcade Fire is so good at getting to the heart of the issue.

I think people are reading too closely into the mentions of suicide in this song. Creature comfort is anything that takes away pain. The pain of having/thinking you had a rough childhood and resenting your parents because of it, the pain of not being attractive by societal standards, etc. - eased by creature comforts.

Suicide can be creature comfort, as it takes away that pain (among other things..), but not all comforts are suicide. People take pills, try to do things to themselves to look more "attractive", etc. It's all in the name of making yourself feel less bad about life.

The song addresses the pain we feel, what we do to mask the pain, and then through lyrics like "born in a diamond mine, it's all around you but you can't see it" the band tells us that there's a world of wonderful things surrounding us and yet, because society perpetually enforces itself upon us, we can't see the good.

"God make me famous, if you can't, just make it painless"

I don't believe fame really is the end game imagined here, as much as just being "perfect". Society tells us we need to have everything to be happy: nice house/car/perfect body (if not, buy x product to look better!) and when we inevitably can't live up to this, we seek creature comfort to "manage" our pain.

I don't think the band wants to come across as too preachy, but they are telling us to not let society/consumerism dictate our happiness and that we should try to instead focus on the good - because despite all of the bad, this is still probably the best time to be alive in the history of mankind.

Today was the first time that I heard this song and wow is it good. I can relate to it, not exactly word for word but close. I'll tell a short story. Yeah I did come close cos I started to fill up the bathtub. Only difference, I didn't tell anybody. A lot of things were going wrong and I had just taken a pill to take the edge off (even though it was meant for nausea, I still took it cos it was the only pill that seemed to relax me). Anyways, I had been crying for so long and I felt such a depressing feeling inside I just wanted everything to stop. So I went into the bathroom contemplating a lot of things. I locked the door, layed on the floor for about an hour, then I started to fill the tub. I was in another state of mind, and I started to put on some songs that meant a lot to me. I vaguely remember things from that night, but I knew some of the songs I were playing were Sad Song, Take Me Away, I Know It's Over, Nobody Home, No Distance Left to Run, Starman, and some other stuff. These songs only made me sadder and the bathtub wasn't filling up fast enough. So I layed down and started to count, but everytime I counted up to 20 I got scared and went back up for air. I don't know how many times I did that. I won't tell everything that happened after that, but you get the central idea of it. I've kinda gone a bit off topic from the song, and there still are other parts of the song I relate to, but that's all for now.

@SLRPP Your interpretation seems great, sure, but still I don't think we shouldn't "look too close" into the suicide thing. It actually shows the reasons, maybe the most common ones, young people (mainly) find to resort to suicide, and deep into such reasons we see our society is the responsible for it: beauty standards, the way society raises a boy to be a "man", the lack of a good relationship between parents and their kids etc.

Notice that most of it is about the pressure to "become someone", or about the expectations of others on us, which leads to the feelings of failure, impotence when these things aren't achieved.

As I read on YouTube comments for this song, it's interesting how they don't mean to blame the person thinking about suicide, on the contrary, they expose it all and sing that "penniless and nameless" isn't as important as each one of us are to those who care about us: they bring both perspectives to the song.

"Assisted suicide She dreams about dying all the time She told me she came so close Filled up the bathtub and put on our first record"

This I found specially touching. I believe they're speaking to those who pretend not see what's right under their noses, like hearing someone saying "tonight I'm hanging myself" but still don't caring enough: "assisted suicide", calling us to be more sensitive about other's feelings and do not take anyone for granted.