10. Arcade Fire

Photo by Philip Cosores

Arcade Fire live to thrill. It doesn’t matter how much they’ve changed over the years — from wide-eyed twentysomethings singing their hearts out at clubs to worldwide stadium tours adorned with rotating glass mirrors — but the Canadian troupe pound their drums and tilt their heads to the sky to sing loud enough for the back rows to hear clearly. They’re about energy, spirit, and enthusiasm. Their setlists, ones that vary greatly by tour and night, annotate that patently.

The Grammy-winning band have never lost sight of their hearts, even if charity campaigns and Haitian coffee publicity stunts suggest otherwise. Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, Co. use their power for good. As a thank you to the fans, they toy with their setlist not only each tour, but often for individual nights. Their Reflektor tour alone featured 68 different songs. Of those, 35 were covers ranging from Prince, to Dead Kennedys, to Feist, to Boyz II Men, to many, many more. In fact, they’ve performed so many covers live that we ranked the full list of every one we could find.

Arcade Fire solemnly swear to keep you entertained by changing up the game and giving everyone, even those who have never heard them before, a song to sing along to. If all else fails, the goosebump-inducing “Wake Up” will still overwhelm you live over a decade after its release. –Nina Corcoran

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09. The Cure

Photo by Heather Kaplan

The Cure can play for a very long time. (Just ask our contributing photographer Debi Del Grande, a diehard fan who’ll tell you the number of hours she’s dedicated to Robert Smith and co.) That’s a good thing, though, because their rich, expansive, and wildly diverse catalog demands such extended play. Each night, you’ll hear juicy bits and pieces from the band’s most celebrated works — so, Disintegration, Boys Don’t Cry, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Wish, et al. — and a medley of B-sides or neck-high deep cuts that will floor you.

On average, Smith will juggle something like 67 tracks each tour, which is understandable considering they’re known to knock out 45-song setlists on special occasions. They also tend to capitalize on particular albums for each jaunt; for example, last year’s tour was heavy on The Top and Disintegration, both 2012 and 2013 focused on Disintegration and Wish, while 2011 was dedicated to Three Imaginary Boys and Seventeen Seconds. All in all, they’re the type of band whose old setlists you hate looking at for fear of seeing something you missed. Hell, I’m still kicking myself for missing their performance of “Burn” at 2013’s Voodoo Experience. Days after Halloween, no less. Blargh. –Michael Roffman

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08. The Smashing Pumpkins

Photo by Philip Cosores

Billy Corgan has never been a stranger to controversy. When The Smashing Pumpkins returned in 2007, the vitriol seemingly picked up where it left off, from veteran fans pining for James Iha or D’arcy Wretzky to critics torching the new material. Throughout the next year, the most reviled criticism boiled over from those disappointed in the new setlists, which tended to ease up on the hits to double down on Zeitgeist material and sprawling, unreleased B-sides like the 20-minute-plus “Gossamer”.

The band’s aversion to older material was heavily discussed in the 2008 documentary If All Goes Wrong, which chronicled their early reunion residencies at Asheville, North Carolina’s The Orange Peel and San Francisco’s The Fillmore. Despite the ensuing reunion buzz, Corgan spent most of this time writing and testing new material, teasing fans of older material with deep cuts like “Starla”, “The Crying Tree of Mercury”, “Heavy Metal Machine”, and “Untitled”.

Both sides have salient points, but the situation improved drastically by late 2008, when Corgan started getting really creative with his setlists and found an agreeable marriage between the old and new. As such, fans were hearing crowd favorites (“Mayonaise”, “1979”) alongside previously ignored selections from each album (“Try, Try, Try”, “Soma”). People still griped, especially over their obnoxious cover of Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, but it was a major upgrade.

Since then, the Pumpkins have dusted off pretty much every song in their catalog. Upon the release of 2012’s Oceania, Corgan clarified his thoughts on setlists, telling Rolling Stone: “People try to make a big deal, like I don’t want to play my old songs. That’s not it. I don’t want to play my old songs if that’s my only option. That’s a different thing. If I’m gonna get up onstage and there’s an audience that wants to hear Oceania, you’re gonna have the happiest guy in the world playing his own songs.”

Sadly, this past summer’s setlists were fairly copy and paste each night, but hey, he also brought back Jimmy Chamberlin behind the drums. You win some and you lose some. Here’s hoping they stick together and that their next jaunt finds the band unwrapping more material from Monuments to an Elegy. –Michael Roffman

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07. The Grateful Dead

Setlists are one thing, but for Grateful Dead, even if they played the exact same set of songs from one night to the next, the legacy of the band is that it would still be a very different experience. This commitment to jamming resulted in a whole genre of touring bands taking their inspiration from the Dead and seeing situations where diehards would follow the band around on tour. That kind of devotion would seem strange to bands that play the same set every night, and bands that deviate from that formula are rewarded by a more dedicated level of fandom. Music has the Dead to thank for that, and the ripples (pun intended) are still being felt with the band’s recent Santa Clara and Chicago concerts reaching enormous audiences not just on site, but via streaming video. –Philip Cosores

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06. Wilco

Photo by Nina Corcoran

Part of Wilco’s prolonged success, beyond the band’s consistently solid output, can be attributed to their willingness to play around with formula. It would be easy for them to roll out a rubber-stamped setlist of fan favorites every night, and on particularly long tours it’s understandably hard to resist the temptation. But the band has too much of an experimental streak coursing through its veins to put up with “easy.” As a result, a Wilco show always has the potential to turn into something unusual and unexpected.

Jeff Tweedy and friends have undertaken five-night residencies in Chicago in which they’ve played all of their songs, while more recently the band pared down its songs to fit a front porch acoustic sing-along at this year’s Solid Sound Festival. The surprise release of Star Wars the night before the start of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival also turned what would have otherwise been another festival gig into an unprecedented debut of new material. –Ryan Bray

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