Last month I wrote about mainstream artists scoring points with the indie crowd. This month the roles are flipped, and back to a more traditional situation.If your eardrums were pleasantly surprised by some of the tunes used in Super Bowl commercials on Feb. 7, don’t be alarmed. While most people talked about which commercials were their favorites, I was most surprised and delighted by the music that accompanied a couple of the better commercials. Some could argue that Grizzly Bear is hitting the big-time, but they’re still relatively obscure on the mainstream radar. But Volkswagen exposed them to more than 100 million sets of ears for the big game by using the song “Two Weeks” off Veckatimest for its “Punch Dub” commercial, which features — hilariously — Stevie Wonder and Tracy Morgan.

But the big winners for the big game had to have been Arcade Fire, whose song “Wake Up” was featured in the NFL’s “Best Fans on the Planet” commercial (below), which aired a number of times throughout the game and could be seen on the Jumbotron at the stadium in Miami (I could hear it in the background as the broadcast came back from commercial break). For those not familiar with Arcade Fire but recognize the song, it was also re-recorded and used in the trailer for the recent Spike Jonze film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.”

It’s funny that the song is getting all this recognition now, because it was received tons of critical and indie praise when it was released in 2004, yet barely registered a blip in the mainstream.

Thanks to those dastardly music blogs that the RIAA hates, I recently was turned onto Holly Miranda, a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter I instantly fell in love with. Had I not followed this blog, it’s likely I never would have heard of her, but I have since gone to Google and found a lot of great live videos she’s put out, including this amazing 17-minute, one-take, three-song performance that starts in a bar, moves down a couple of blocks, up a stairwell and into an apartment. I gladly plopped down the $5 to buy her EP from HollyMiranda.com and am anxiously awaiting her debut full-length album, The Magician’s Private Library, due out at the end of the month.

[Holly Miranda photo via her MySpace]