Less than a month after I started my freshman year here at NIU, Arcade Fire released their debut album, “Funeral.”

It would go on to be a touchstone album for popular music of this decade and the very definition of a “breakout” album that was ecstatically well-liked by critics, and even more so by fans.

When people talk about “Funeral,” there is often a kind of majestic awe in their eyes, as if the 10 songs on the album could move mountains to tears. “Funeral” achieves this by taking an honest kind of angst and magnifying it to an operatic scope.

Because of its release date, I can’t help but associate “Funeral” with my four years at NIU. And as I await graduation – cap, gown and all – I can’t help but think of how it covers many of the emotions and experiences I think a lot of students have shared.

Take the album’s anthemic opener, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” a song in which a character dreams of digging himself out of his snowed-in house and escaping to a place of juvenile independence: “And since there’s no one else around / we let our hair grow long / and forget all we used to know / then our skin gets thicker / from living out in the snow.”

But this starts to go wrong when the character has children and can no longer remember bits of his past as a reference point, climaxing with singer Win Butler’s desperate question about his parents; “Well, whatever happened to them?”

Now cut to an 18-year-old version of myself, who couldn’t wait to get out of that house he lived in his whole life. The version of me who literally did cartwheels the moment his parents drove out of sight on that warm, sun-drenched move-in day.

I was powered by that primal desire to get out on my own and make some kind of name for myself in something; anything. Only later did I realize that, like the characters in “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” just because I wanted some kind of maturity doesn’t mean I had any understanding of how to get it.

This internal conflict is given another angle on the album’s exquisite closer, “In the Backseat.” Butler’s wife, Régine Chassagne, dreams of being a child in the backseat of a car, watching the scenery while someone else drives. But her innocence is shattered by a death in her family.

And yet, like the mantra that came after Feb 14., she moves forward.

“I’ve been learning to drive,” she passionately sings, “my whole life.”

There’s something so honest about that line.

One might think that they leave NIU different than when they came in. That may be true, but only in the sense that everyone changes and will always be changing. Even after classes, exams, all-nighters, events within and beyond our control, we’re still learning to drive.

Now, after four years here – with this last one being by far the most eventful – I put on this record, feel my cynicism melt away and hope that I never stop learning.