Win Butler

Todd L. Burns

Please welcome one of the brains behind one of the biggest bands in the world, Arcade Fire: Win Butler.

Win Butler

Welcome to Montréal. You guys are kind of taking over my city for a little bit. So you’re very welcome. It’s not my city, but you guys are more than welcome to be here. I have a little ticket, if anyone has any trouble, you just give them a little pass and you’re good.

Todd L. Burns

Montréal pass?

Win Butler

Montréal pass.

Todd L. Burns

I think a lot of people kind of identify you with Montréal, but I guess, do you identify, now, with being a Montréaler? You’ve been here for how many years?

Win Butler

Well, I was born in northern California, I grew up in Houston, I moved to Montréal when I was 19 or 20. So I’ve been here, for maybe 15, 15 years now? Yeah, I guess I kind of self-identify as an American Montréaler. I can’t quite be a Quebecer. I can’t quite be a Canadian. But I’m definitely a Montréaler.

Todd L. Burns

You grew up mostly in Houston, though?

Win Butler

Yes.

Todd L. Burns

What was your childhood like in Houston? Because it actually isn’t specifically Houston, it’s a suburb quite outside of Houston, right, the Woodlands?

Win Butler

Yeah, all of Houston, it’s so spread out, I think it’s about the same population of Chicago but it’s maybe twice the area. So yeah, super, lots of satellite towns. I moved there when I was five. It’s one of my really early memories, getting off the plane in Houston from northern California and the door of the plane opened and just the hot air. It was August or something like that. Just like the heat and humidity hit me, and I kind of looked at my mom and I was like, “What the fuck? What is this? Why are we here? What is this?”

Yeah, it’s a strange town. It’s almost like living in... I mean it’s, oil industry and then… it’s like many cities in one.

Todd L. Burns

What was Woodlands like specifically?

Win Butler

The Woodlands is like a weird suburban, I feel like it was one of the first planned communities in the ’70s. I actually looked this up. I actually made a record about it called The Suburbs. Some of the emotional side of it. Yeah, the dude that founded my town, I learned this recently, he was a real estate guy. He bought up the whole area and he got his money from, he invented fracking. So… pretty cool dude.

Todd L. Burns

What a legacy.

Win Butler

Yeah, what a legacy. So fracking, and planned communities.

Todd L. Burns

So it was a little bit boring.

Win Butler

It was a fine place to be a kid. You’re kind of by yourself, there were a lot of bike trails, and yeah… Houston Rockets won the championship when I was a kid, I was really into basketball. Hakeem Olajuwon, kind of my all time hero. I knew from a pretty early age that I wanted to get out of there as soon as it was conceivably possible. I ended up pretty far away.

Todd L. Burns

With the suburbs – I grew up in the suburbs – getting music around that is a little bit difficult, especially pre-internet era.

Win Butler

Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

You know. What kind of music stores existed in the Woodlands?

Win Butler

Well, they built a mall when I was in high school, I think it would have been the mall at a certain point, but it was mostly the radio. I mean, I guess a band like the Cure, the bands that were big enough to make it on the radio that were different. Depeche Mode and then... yeah. That would have been the stuff I gravitated towards.

Todd L. Burns

But you weren’t getting like, obscure 7"s and that type of stuff?

Win Butler

I don’t really like obscure 7"s. No, I like obscure stuff too, but I think everyone when they’re drunk and with their friends want to hear stuff that’s really great. Some of it’s obscure and some of it’s extremely popular. The only record we had in my house when I was in California was Thriller. That was the only popular music I heard. Which is pretty solid. It’s extremely popular and extremely good.

Todd L. Burns

That said, you did grow up quite a bit with music. Your mom played the harp?

Win Butler

Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

And your grandfather was a guitarist, right?

Win Butler

Yeah. My grandfather’s probably… in terms of the scope of my life, is probably my biggest influence. He played in big bands in the ’30s. He played with… I have photos of him with Louie Armstrong, played with Duke Ellington. He died when he was 96. He had a basement studio. We went into his studio after he passed and he had a Pro Tools session open. He was recording himself with an octave pedal, doing bass lines, making a bass out of a guitar. Recording his own music. He pretty much, he invented the first prototype of the first electric guitar. He modified the pedal steel guitar. Used primitive version of the vocoder, in the ’30s. He was a pretty futuristic dude. He bought me my first guitar. Basically he died while we were making Funeral. The record is called Funeral partially from the experience of going to his funeral. Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

We actually have a video, to paint a picture of what he was doing way back when, maybe we can go ahead and show that.

Win Butler

Yeah. Cool.

(video: Alvino Rey)

Yeah, I remember one of the bass players around that era in his band was Charles Mingus and when they were checking into hotels in the south, he’d have to wear a Hawaiian shirt and pretend he was Hawaiian so he could stay at the same hotel. Pretty crazy.

Todd L. Burns

That was Alvino Rey, and I guess it was a guitar, it was talking, the legs were dangling over the chair. Do you know much about that video specifically?

Win Butler

That would have been in some, like a little cutaway in a film. I actually don’t know what the specific film was. He had something called a Sonovox, which was essentially two speakers without a cone. My grandmother, who was a singer, would be off the stage and you hold the speakers to your throat and the signal of the guitar would pass and you kind of vocalize, make the sounds with your mouth basically so the vibration of the guitar moves your vocal chords and you vocalize just by... it kind of hurts actually to do it. I’ve tried it before, but it’s kind of painful. My grandmother sang in a group called the King Sisters. They performed together so I had a very early example of a life in music and a couple that was married that was playing music together. Yeah, man… when he passed away, he would just sell a guitar. He really didn’t have much money at the end of his life. He would just sell a guitar every year, that was kind of how he would survive. When he died, he basically just left nothing but a couple guitars. He hid a bunch of gold coins around his house and left a map for my mom and her brothers to find the coins. That’s what they did after he died. Just a magical dude, you know? He didn’t leave them with much, but just kind of made it an adventure. Anyway, really beautiful man.

Todd L. Burns

In terms of you making music, when did that actually start? When did you first kind of get into bands, specifically? Was that something that started in Houston?

Win Butler

A little bit. My mom was a harpist and she was very inspired by Joni Mitchell and she wanted to kind of be Joni Mitchell, but with a harp, which was not really possible. At that time.

Todd L. Burns

There’s Joanna Newsom, right?

Win Butler

It kind of is now. Yeah, I took my mom to see Joanna Newsom. She’s like, “That’s what I was trying to do. Oh my god.” (laughs) It’s like 30 years later. She would do gigs in elementary schools and stuff so my brother and I played, did that stuff with her. Music, she’d be playing Debussy when I got home from school. I was like, “Stop playing the harp, it’s so annoying.” I didn’t really think of it in a professional sense because it was so normal. It’s like, if your dad’s an accountant, you’re not like, “I want to be an accountant when I grow up!” Yeah, I don’t know.

Todd L. Burns

Were you writing songs in Houston or did that start later when you got to Montréal?

Win Butler

I was in Houston until I was about 15. My dad’s family’s from New England and he’d gone to boarding school. I wasn’t extremely happy. I don’t think I knew I was unhappy but he basically asked if I wanted to go away to school and I applied to this school called Phillips Exeter. I got in, and I was like, “OK, I’ll try.” I left home when I was 15. Just before I was leaving, I was like, “Well, I should probably learn to play the guitar so I have something to do when I’m away from home.” When I got there, I was super depressed because my family was in Texas and I was in New Hampshire, so I would just kind of play guitar all day, every day, and not do my homework and be sad, and listen to the Cure.

Todd L. Burns

Then you get a short stop off in Boston.

Win Butler

Yeah. I went to art school at Sarah Lawrence College for a year in New York in 1999 or something. Then I was still just staying in my room and making 4-track recordings and not going to class. I thought that there was better uses of my parents money than having me make 4-track recordings.

Todd L. Burns

Were you sharing them with anyone, at this point?

Win Butler

What’s that?

Todd L. Burns

The 4-track recordings. Were you sharing those with anyone?

Win Butler

Not really. I just felt compelled there. I wasn’t really trying to be in a band or anything. It was just kind of for my own sanity what I would do. Then I was walking around campus, I just kind of had this flash that I should start a band with my best friend from high school, so I just like went to a pay phone and I called him, my friend Jess. I was like, “You’re dropping out of school. I’m dropping out of school. We’re starting a band this summer. OK, talk to you later.” Pretty much since then, I dropped out of school, we played music all summer and that was kind of the beginning of whatever it is that I do now, basically. Or at least, the beginning of trying to find a drummer, which lasted about five years.

Todd L. Burns

It’s always the drummer.

Win Butler

Always the drummer, yeah.

Todd L. Burns

How did you make your way up here then? From the States?

Win Butler

My best friend that I started the band with, he brought his best friend. It was three of us, writing all summer. We just got crappy summer jobs and kind of wrote all day, every day. We were supposed to... he was living in Providence and we were going to follow him to Providence. The day we were supposed to leave, he quit the band. It was me and his best friend that I didn’t know very well at the time, my friend Josh. We were kind of like stuck with each other. We’re like, “Well, I don’t feel like we need to move to Providence now,” because literally the only reason we were going there is for Justin. We were like, “Boston. Let’s go to Boston.” Which was a horrible, dreary, expensive place to live.

Todd L. Burns

Shout out Boston.

Win Butler

I’m sure it has many qualities, but I did not discover them in the year that I lived there. It was so expensive to live there. The good thing was that it was so expensive to live... I mean, it was probably the same as New York at that point, but just much crappier. We had to share a bedroom. We were in the same bedroom so we couldn’t really have much of a social life or girlfriends or anything. We just essentially just wrote music, all day, every day. That’s kind of, my kind of 10,000 hour period, basically, was pretty much like two years of absolutely nothing but playing and recording all day, every day.

Todd L. Burns

What did you learn? I mean, what were the early things that you feel like you got out of those 10,000 hours that you brought to what happened in Montréal? Are there certain things that you feel like you really got out of that?

Win Butler

I got that what I was making wasn’t good enough. I never felt satisfied with anything I did. Essentially just working as hard as you can and throwing everything in the garbage over and over and over and over and over and over again. Just the complete frustration of trying to find people to play music with and how flaky, how no one took it seriously. For me, it was like life and death and I feel like... it’s like you’d play with these drummers and it’d be like, “I go to Berklee School of Music. Cool, I play the drums.” And you’d play with them and it was just like, “No, that’s not it. That’s so not it.”

Todd L. Burns

What were you looking for?

Win Butler

Just the real shit.

Todd L. Burns

Just as simple as that.

Win Butler

I was just looking for what I heard in all the music that I loved, which was just the real shit. I don’t know how to describe it, but I wasn’t looking for like Berklee School of Music, was not looking for that.

Todd L. Burns

When you moved to Montréal, you were going around looking for people to be in a band again. I think you were going out and you saw Régine at an art gallery, was it, the first time?

Win Butler

Well, yeah, so my friend Josh had dropped out of Concordia to move to Boston with me. After a year of just complete non-success and nothing happening, he was like, “OK, I have to go back to school.” I followed him. I really didn’t know anything about Montréal before I moved here. I didn’t know anything about Canada. The US education system is really light on Canadian history, or Quebec history. Not mentioned. I took a lot of Texas history and we would alternate between Texas and US history, learn no European history, nothing about Canada. I really came in pretty... I moved here in the winter.

Todd L. Burns

You obviously did not read about Canadian history.

Win Butler

I mean, I knew it was it was cold. I had lived in New Hampshire. When I got to Montréal, culturally, it kind of had everything I thought that New York was going to have, but Montréal actually had the stuff that New York was going to have, which was, which maybe it was in New York, but when I was there, I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I went to shows every night. When I was in New York, all I found was like people not from New York, being like, “I want to be in a famous band.” I was like, “Your band’s not going to be famous.” I felt like I was in a never-ending showcase of... like, an industry showcase. I was like, “No,” that’s not what I was looking for. Then when I got to Montréal, it was like, all of our first shows were at weird modern dance shows and there’d be a band playing or someone’s loft and we’d play records and dance afterwards. Rent was so incredibly cheap.

Todd L. Burns

You have a faraway look in your eyes.

Win Butler

It’s beautiful to think about it. The exchange rate was so strong and rent was so cheap. There’s this amazing confluence of French African and Haitian and European culture. Even just going to Italian coffee shops in the Portuguese neighborhood and the vibrancy of culture in Montréal I found so profound and I still do. That’s what I still really love about Montréal is how cultures maintain their distinctiveness and the crazy melting pot of the whole thing.

Todd L. Burns

I guess Régine’s a product of that, your now wife.

Win Butler

Yeah. When I met Régine, I was still looking for a drummer. It was two years later. She was going to McGill at the time and I would hang out outside the drummers’ rooms trying to find a drummer. She saw me in the cafeteria. It’s a very small program and I pretty clearly didn’t go there. We were talking. I was describing to her what I was looking for. She was like, “Oh, you’re not going to find it here but I might know someone.” Then a couple of days later just by complete chance I saw her singing jazz at an art opening at Concordia and she was just the real deal, like a real singer. I talked to her and I was like, “We have to play music together.” Eventually we hung out and pretty much the first time we hung out we wrote the beginnings of a song called “Headlights Look Like Diamonds” and maybe two or three other songs basically in an hour and a half and that was that.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t we take a listen to “Headlights Look Like Diamonds” really quick?

(music: Arcade Fire – “Headlights Look Like Diamonds”)

Win Butler

I think anyone that saw our band play at that time would say that the recording is just horrible but live that was like our first hit song, kind of. The first time we played that at a show, it was crazy. For whatever reason that was the first time in Montréal that we were playing and we played that song. It was like something was happening. You could feel even people that were skeptical about our band were like, “OK.” At that time when we made the first EP, the recording and production process, we were trying to get to a sound and I felt like it was just never it. It’s like we would play live and it would be amazing and then you’re just stuck. I had an early 001 Digidesign on a computer rig and you’d record everything. It’s like, “It sounds so good in the room. Why can’t I make it sound the way that it sounds?”

I think one of the really amazing things in Montréal that we were so fortunate with was that there’s still all these analog recording studios and so [there was] Hotel2Tango at that time, which is where Godspeed! You Black Emperor recorded. And Howard Bilerman who ran that studio saw us play live and really liked the band and essentially gave us a chance to do a recording in his studio, which was just a two-inch tape machine and a new tech desk and basic tools that you can actually work with to make something sound the way the records that I love sound. It was just like finally some tools to work with. I’m cheating at your playlist but actually the song called “Laika”, it’s the second song on Funeral, we had just gotten into the studio and I remember doing an overdub of electric guitar. There’s this really funny thing in Montreal. When we were coming up, it was a very avant-jazz, electronic… the scene was really not pop music at all so for us even having singing or a vocalist, people were like, “Oh, you fucking sell outs. You have singing in your music.” I remember the dude because our drummer, Howard ended up drumming on the record and so we had someone helping and I did this overdub on electric guitar and I came back and it was the first time I had ever heard my music recorded. It was like, “That’s exactly how I wanted it to sound.” It was the first time I ever heard it coming out of the speakers and I was like, “Yes. That’s what I meant to say.” The dude that was recording, helping hit play and record, was like, “It was better before the overdub.” It’s like, “No. It wasn’t. It truly wasn’t.” He was like this punk like, “Yeah, you sell out. I can’t believe you put an overdub on your music.” It made me really aware that it really doesn’t fucking matter what anyone thinks about any kind of political rules when it comes to music because it’s just really silly.

Todd L. Burns

Do you feel like… obviously there’s this huge scene of indie rock in Montréal? Did you feel like you were a part of that at that time or was it this situation where you were very much an outlier? Did you feel like there were other bands in this city that were more kindred spirits?

Win Butler

I didn’t know anything about indie rock. Régine didn’t know what indie rock was until she read articles about Arcade Fire described as indie rock. She was so not… I think the first poster that we made looking for drummers when Régine joined the band, we had a list of influences and it’s pretty funny. It was pretty on the nose. It was New Order, Debussy, Arvo Part, the Pixies. I think I might have said Depeche Mode, I don’t know, and Neil Young and Motown, which sounds crazy but it’s pretty much what our band sounds like.

Todd L. Burns

That’s why you never got a drummer very quickly.

Win Butler

Yeah. It’s like, “No, trust us. It makes sense. I know it sounds broad.” Yeah. Pixies, Motown, Neil Young, New Order, Arvo Part, Debussy.

Todd L. Burns

What do we hear on Funeral? Do we hear all of that or was something coming a little bit more to the fore?

Win Butler

I hear all that. I mean, I hear all of that but played by amateurs. I don’t know, man. To me, whatever medium you’re recording in, you’d have to find the place where you start to break the machine a little bit. It’s like when something gets over driven or something goes wrong in the synthesizer or something is wrong with the guitar and you kind of push it to a point where it starts to break up or it starts to break and it’s kind of a different point with every type of music. I feel like, on that first record, it was like everything was in the red, everything was emotionally in the red. Yeah, we’re just trying to make music because we were playing 100 shows in these little bars and I don’t want people talking at the bar when we’re playing. If we’re fucking playing, I wanted people to be aware that we’re playing, like in the back of the room, out in the street, I just didn’t want to make background music so I think that’s part of, vocally, the first record is really just like, I was essentially just breaking my voice, taking my voice. How can I make it, break it, basically.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t we take a listen to one track from this. As you mentioned earlier, this is “Laika.”

(music: Arcade Fire – “Laika”)

Win Butler

Yeah that was, for me, that was one of the first things we ever recorded that sounded the way it sounded in my head, pretty much. It still does. When I listen to “Headlights” I’m like, “Argh.” It’s not a lo-fi thing because that’s pretty lo-fi sounding but it sounded the way it was supposed to sound, which to me, that’s the difference in production. It has nothing to do with how expensive the tool is but it’s more just about trying to realize the actual thing that you’re imagining and have it come out that way, for me.

Todd L. Burns

That album has been hailed to the heavens. Everyone, it’s the #1 album of the decade, all of this stuff. What do we still not know about that album? Because I feel like it’s been talked about so much. Is there anything from that time that you feel like is underrated or not talked about that really was something important?

Win Butler

(pauses) I mean, I think that a piece of... I don’t know. The song “Wake Up”, the actual recording of that was the first session we went in to do... we had enough money to do one session and so we were going to do a split 7" of “Power Out” and “Wake Up.” Those were the two songs we had enough money and enough time to record in the session that we had. We didn’t have a drummer still at that point. Régine essentially taught herself to play drums so that we could record, so we could do that session. She never played drums before until the week before that session, essentially.

Yeah, so “Wake Up”, the drums on “Wake Up” are played by Arlen Thompson who was in a band called Wolf Parade that were... in my mind, Wolf Parade was always the Nirvana of Montréal. The first time I saw them play. I was like, “Oh my god, this band is going to be scary huge.” Yeah, they were the first of three, we were the second of three, and there was some band that I don’t remember that was playing and I walked out of the bathroom and Wolf Parade, it was like their first show they’d ever played, they had moved from Vancouver Island a couple weeks before, and I like walked out of the bathroom and was like, “What is that?” I don’t know. I think that’s a really underrated, just being in the same physical space as other people and other bands that are doing stuff that's better than what you’re doing is so important. If you’re not around contemporaries that are making you feel like, “Yikes. I got to go back to work.”

It’s different hearing something online or hearing someone’s record. Seeing a band or an artist the second they... They wrote the song that week and they’re playing it the next day and you’re there and you see it, that’s a whole different can of worms from listening to someone’s recorded output because you’re seeing it kind of being made in real time. For me, there’s a band called the Unicorns that brought us on our first tour that was an amazing live band and... Wolf Parade and a band called the Hidden Cameras from Toronto that, like, “Wow.” When I saw them play I was just like, “We have so much fucking work to do.” They were so much better than us.

Todd L. Burns

Do you feel, I mean, you love basketball and obviously basketball is a competition. Do you feel like that element of competition in your mind, that kind of bell goes off in a way when you see a great band? Not in an antagonistic way, but just kind of, yeah, like I need to get to work.

Win Butler

No, I just… that’s kind of a human thing. With music, unless you hear it, you can’t respond to it. You have to hear. You can’t like something that you’ve never heard before. I think that... I don’t know. I mean, I think that’s why it’s like you look at the really good music scenes when there’s a lot of bands and a lot of diversity of music, it is something about other bands seeing each other and it just kind of like, I don’t know. I guarantee that Talking Heads watched the Ramones play, and it’s not like they played like the Ramones but it definitely changed how they played because they saw it, they’re like, I’m sure if you saw the Ramones at that time you were like, “Fuck,” there’s another level of energy that you can kind of give to your performance. I don’t know, I think with anything it’s really important just to be inspired and be pushed and to be... yeah.

Actually, I have a thing, there’s Dan from Wolf Parade, the first night they ever played, Dan and Spencer were playing songs they had written from their old bands. This was the song that was playing in this bar that I still remember... someone who was my friend who was writing music, it was the first time I had a friend that was... you are a great songwriter, like other great songwriters I know... he had a band called Atlas Strategic, this song is called “Smooth Nights.” I don’t know how the recording will sound, but, amazing song.

Is this playing? I didn’t know. It was working before. Do you want to just give me your... Oh, there we go. Sir.

(music: Atlas Strategic – “Smooth Nights”)

So anyway, the first time I heard that song in a bar, I knew it for the rest of my life. I could have sung that song to you at any point. Around the same time I saw the Magnetic Fields when I was in Boston, when they put out 69 Love Songs. I left that show, I could sing ten Magnetic Fields songs after hearing them once. It wasn’t indie rock to me, it was the first time I had physical contact with people that I thought they were as good songwriters as anyone. That’s what was exciting to me was that, “Oh, these are people that write songs that are great that I know,” as opposed to just listening to stuff that happened in England in the ’80s. You know what I mean? It’s a very different scenario.

Todd L. Burns

You mentioned the Magnetic Fields who record on Merge. Was that one of the reasons that you were drawn to sending your music to them?

Win Butler

Yeah, and Howard Bilerman used to let Superchunk sleep on his couch when they would tour through Montréal, so that’s how he knew them was, essentially, they would crash at his place. So that was the only label that any of us knew anyone at.

They had In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, which is just a complete classic. People will be buying that record. It’s like the first Violent Femmes record. People will be buying that record every year forever. Not everyone, but... I thought that Magnetic Fields and Neutral Milk were about as good as anything. I didn’t know any better songwriters than those guys. My dream was to be on Merge, basically. That would have been our ideal label at that point.

Todd L. Burns

Tell me about what happened after it got released, Funeral. Was it immediate that you were like, “Oh, people are, wow, this reaction is way bigger than we imagined,” or was it something that was a little bit gradual?

Win Butler

It was kind of just infinite frustration... up until the point we recorded the first EP, we released it, that lineup of the band completely imploded. It was right when my brother had moved to Montréal and we were writing Funeral. This kind of amazing thing started to happen, because I had never released any music before, but once it was in the world, everything got a little bit easier. As soon as we actually had a record. We were able to play shows in Toronto, we were able to play shows... everything that had seemed so unattainable... I used to just drive past the Casa Del Popolo and be like, “Why can’t we play there?” We couldn’t even play at Casa Del Popolo.

Todd L. Burns

It’s a venue in Montréal.

Win Butler

Yeah, it’s a small venue, punk venue, owned by one of the guys in Godspeed. To me, that was unattainable, we couldn’t even play there. As soon as we actually had a recording we could. There was this very slow snowball that started to happen as soon as that went into the world. It was very incremental at first. There would be 100 people a show, then there’d be 200 people at a show. This is even before Funeral came out, we got to Toronto to play a show and there’s a line around the block for a club show, and I was like, “Oh, shit, this is crazy.” And then we went home to play Montréal at La Sala Rossa, which is another smaller but beautiful classic venue in Montréal, and there’s a line up in Montréal. I was like, “OK.” For me that’s still the craziest thing of my entire life, was seeing people lined up in front of La Sala Rossa for our show. So anything after that point has been...

Todd L. Burns

It’s all gravy.

Win Butler

Yeah, it’s all that feeling, it’s just that feeling. Everything else is just that, pretty much. So, that was the biggest shock. The Unicorns let us open for them, and so we toured the US and we played a lot of... We’d play in D.C. at the Black Cat or whatever. This is still before Funeral, we had a 7" of “Tunnels,” the first track on Funeral, and the EP. I remember playing in Washington, D.C., opening for, the first of three, I think it was The Unicorns. Us, and then Chromeo, and then the Unicorns. There were 300 people there and we sold 250 copies of the EP. As the first band of three. Which was fucking crazy. It was totally crazy. That was before, there was no press, that was nothing. It was just, we played, and 250 people were like, “I would like to buy your CD.”

Todd L. Burns

So tell me about your live show at that point, because I think that’s... you’re obviously winning over, I’m not a math major, but that’s a lot of a percentage of that audience, to what you were doing.

Win Butler

Just the perfect band to be playing with, and we were... anyone who was into the Unicorns was going to be into our band, and we were a six-piece, and everyone’s playing like they’re going to die the next day if they don’t hit the note as hard as they humanly can for 45 minutes.

Todd L. Burns

You were going out into the audience, though, by this point and kind of…

Win Butler

I always did that because we would play loft shows acoustically with just a mic for the vocals so I would always play in the audience because otherwise everyone was just talking the whole time. Yeah, I mean, that seemed like the most straightforward way to make people not talk was just to be in the audience because you feel like an asshole and you’re talking and the singer’s right next to you.

Todd L. Burns

It’s a good tip.

Win Butler

We would always start the show by playing in the audience acoustically through the crowd onto the stage. That’s how we would always start our show because it was essentially like, “Hey guys, the show is starting...” It was just a way to kind of take whatever the space of the room was and be in the room and be aware that you’re in a room and we’re all in a room and let’s listen to these songs and kind of create... because it’s kind of a two-way thing with the audience. If the audience doesn’t buy in, then you’re fucked to begin with. The audience has to accept your basic proposal or else it’s never going to happen anyway.

Todd L. Burns

Going into the second album, what was your thought process? Were you worried? Were you nervous? Were you totally feeling free?

Win Butler

Well, I mean, it was crazy. The whole thing of Funeral was crazy because I think we set a goal to sell 10,000 records and we sold 10,000 records the first week the record was out and we’re like, “OK.”

Todd L. Burns

Got to make some new goals.

Win Butler

Got to make some new goals. David Bowie and David Byrne came to our first headlining show in New York. We sang with David Byrne the next time we were in New York and David Bowie was there. At the end of the Funeral... yeah, I mean it was just insane. It was like it just got bigger and bigger. The record didn’t come out in the UK until six or eight months after it came out in the US because we didn’t have a label yet. Then we did the whole fucking thing again in the UK and it was just as crazy. It was like maybe two years of non stop... I was super sick all the time. We were playing seven shows in eight days and matinee. We’d play three shows in San Francisco, two shows at the Troubadour in LA, matinee and evening, and then go play the radio station at like eight in the morning the next day. It was crazy. Literally, I was dying. I was super ill.

If you listen to recordings from that, it’s like, no voice. Yeah, I mean, in the end of that we performed with David Bowie, he covered our song, we sang with him; we opened for U2 in Montréal. That’s just at the end of the Funeral tour. We opened for U2 at the arena in Montréal and they had been using “Wake Up” as their walk on music for the whole tour, so when we’re... we played “Where the Streets Have No Name” as our walk on music which was the best. It was still the best move of all time because everyone came running from the bathrooms because they thought U2 was playing. It was amazing, it was so great. It was like (singing). Great, amazing walk on music. If you guys ever need walk on music, “Where the Streets Have No Name” really gets people going.

That was like the end of that. I don’t know, I mean, I think we just had so much smoke blown up our ass and we just wanted nothing to do with anyone, didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to talk about anything and so we bought a church, like a small church east of Montréal, a town called Farnham and… churches are very cheap in Farnham if you guys are looking to… it’s very cheap real estate.

Yeah, we just set up a studio and our instinct was kind of a very protective instinct of just like, “Forget the world,” pretend like it’s not there, create this environment where we’re just in our own weird little bubble and make a record. That was our thought process.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t we take a listen to a track off of that record, “No Cars Go”.

(music: Arcade Fire – “No Cars Go”)

You went out to a farm, but you brought a producer with you?

Win Butler

No.

Todd L. Burns

OK.

Win Butler

No, I mean, we’re …

Todd L. Burns

It was just you away from the world.

Win Butler

It was just us. We had an engineer named Scott Colburn that we started working with at that point that, he had done some Animal Collective records and basically... actually, that song, we just plugged everything in and that was right after we’d come off tour for Funeral and so that was recorded way before the rest of the record because we had just been playing it live for two years and it was like, “OK, let’s just cut this while we know how to play it.” We essentially just did two takes of the song and that’s the only song we ever did a tape edit. It was, the first half of it is from one take. The second half is from another take. Cut the fucking tape, spliced it, which is terrifying. There’s a reason why people use Pro Tools. It’s a lot.

I think it’s, yeah. My friend made a comment the other day. I was reading Kid Koala was saying that when people from the future listen to music from now, they’re going to say, “Wow, the people really liked editing. People must have really been into editing back then.” This is so much... I feel like all I do is edit now. It’s like I’m a full time editor.

Todd L. Burns

That song had been kicking around for a long time. You had recorded that even on your first EP.

Win Butler

Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

Why did you come back to that particular one?

Win Butler

It was just one that didn’t sound like the way it was supposed to sound and the way we had been playing it live was so radically different from the way it had been.

Todd L. Burns

You’ve come back to a number of songs over the years or recorded different versions of songs. Do you feel like once you put it on a record, finally, is it done or for you, is songwriting kind of always this malleable; there’s 100 different ways and different versions of things?

Win Butler

That one wasn’t done but yeah, I think it depends on who’s singing it. I mean, there’s tons of examples of cover versions where the cover version is way more interesting than the original. I think it depends. One of the classic examples I think of is Blondie when they were working. What’s the super famous Blondie song? “Heart of Glass”. The original demo, original version of “Heart of Glass” is so different and they recorded it like six years before that record. It's still really cool. I love the original version of “Heart of Glass”. It’s amazing.

Todd L. Burns

Do you have songs kicking around right now that are six years, seven years old that you’re still trying to nail down?

Win Butler

Oh yeah, sometimes it takes ten years. Sometimes it takes ten minutes, sometimes it takes ten years. That’s what makes making a record hard. If everything just took ten years or everything just took ten minutes, it’d be easier.

Todd L. Burns

That record, Neon Bible, was the first time you did work with an outside producer, maybe after you were at the farm. Why did you make that decision to bring in this guy... Markus Dravs, right?

Win Butler

I think Markus is actually just credited as an engineer on that record. We always kind of produce our own stuff... I think he has a production credit on “Suburbs.” The practical reason was that Howard wasn’t in the band. Régine plays drums on half of Funeral maybe and Howard plays drums on the other half. But Jeremy started playing with us on the Funeral tour. Our amazing drummer, Jeremy Gara. We just decided to work in our own studio so we didn’t have to be counting hours and thinking about paying a studio all the time.

Todd L. Burns

What was the idea behind Neon Bible in terms of the sound and where you wanted to take what you had done on the first album?

Win Butler

I never wanted to be in a band that sounded one way. I don’t think you should be able to tell what a band sounds like just from one record. The way I always think about it is, I feel like if our band could be called the Neon Bibles or the Suburbs or Reflektors and it’s almost like you’re starting a new band every time. And it should be able to stand on its own, aesthetically.

That was my first experience of... because I feel like we came in the first wave of people talking about music on the internet, with making it more popular. That cuts many ways obviously. I knew there was going to be just so much bullshit.

You should go back sometime and read NME reviews of like the Clash just to make yourself chuckle. It’s the best. They’re like... The New York Times talking about the White Album. There’s so much fucking wrong bullshit that people say about music. You don’t really know if anything is good for ten or 20 years anyways, so all you can really do is get lost in your own world and try and make something that’s interesting to you. So that was my first experience of consciously... like, don’t listen to what anyone says about anything ever. Just don’t worry about it.

Todd L. Burns

Do you still sometimes accidentally read the reviews or hear these things and it sends you into a tailspin? Or have you completely blocked it out by now?

Win Butler

No. I’ve never read a review that was well written enough that hurt me that bad. I can’t actually remember any review I’ve read of anything, to be honest. I don’t have a lot of... (ironic tone) oh man, I remember where I was when I read the review of OK Computer. When that first magazine was still hot and I read what Uncut thought about OK Computer. I still get shivers thinking about it, it’s crazy. It was so descriptive. I hadn’t heard the music yet but I could just imagine how transcendent it was. Wow. Incredible. And then the Mojo review was so powerful as well. NME always has it right, so.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t we take a listen to a song from the next album and talk a little bit about it afterwards? This is “Ready to Start.”

(music: Arcade Fire – “Ready To Start”)

Todd L. Burns

Why’d you want to write a record about the suburbs?

Win Butler

I don’t know. I kind of felt like I was at a point in my life where I just had these really visceral memories of... for me, a lot of songwriting starts with a feeling more than a lyric. It almost starts with a feeling. You spend the course of a record trying to look at it from different angles and try to say something about it.

I was just kind of daydreaming one day. I was closing my eyes and trying to remember the Woodlands. Like when I would ride my bike... the kind of path I would take, and try to remember every detail just as a mental exercise almost. Remember exactly how long it would take to drive down the street and turn left. It brought up a lot, I wrote a lot of lyrics, wrote a ton of stuff. It just kind of brought up a lot.

With my friend Josh that I originally started the band with, I had an idea for a science fiction film called The Suburbs. The only image I really had was basically kind of a war scene in a McDonald’s. It was kind of like a fire fight. Weird, suburban kind of war film. The title was kind of from this imaginary movie.

Even “Headlights Look Like Diamonds,” there are lyrics about the suburbs. Every record, I feel like it’s been a recurring theme. The Rolling Stones don’t have any songs about the suburbs. I feel like you have to talk about shit that people haven’t talked about before sometimes.

Talk about shit that people haven’t talked about before sometimes. There was stuff I felt like I wanted to say that maybe Radiohead had hinted at but they never actually talked about it. It was always like this kind of weird imaginary place and I wanted to kind of write about some of the more boring shit.

Todd L. Burns

And did you go off for that album in the same way that you went off for the album before? Did you try to close yourself off from everyone?

Win Butler

I mean that record I think we wrote for a full year before we even played a note of music. I kind of knew before we did The Suburbs that just with the kind of culture we are in that if we didn’t make a great record that no one would give a shit about our band anymore, basically. That’s how I felt at the time. That there’s kind of, this culture of like wanting to tear everything down. I just felt this like, “OK, if we’re gonna make a record we have to just do the best thing we possibly can or it doesn’t matter,” basically.

Todd L. Burns

It’s also at that kind of weird moment where CDs were pretty much leaving and is kind of, going almost all digital, right? That wasn’t on your mind.

Win Butler

That wasn’t really on my mind. I mean that song was cut in the house that we moved into in Montréal, a very small living room, like maybe the size of that corner of that room with a ten foot ceiling, two drum kits. It was basically all in one room, basically, that song. Tiny room. It doesn’t necessarily sound like it but that’s how it was cut, tape machine in the back of the living room.

Todd L. Burns

Tell me about some of the recording techniques that you’re using, I mean to get this sound? I mean that’s a lot of power for something in such a small space.

Win Butler

Well the thing that we do is... I’ve kind of just started to gravitate towards being in smaller and smaller rooms. I remember visiting the Motown studio in Detroit, which is essentially just a basement of a house. For me Motown... I mean Kanye talks about like being on the level of Walt Disney but like Motown is on the level of Walt Disney. You know? Motown for me is like one of the great American... the overall quality in the music that is produced by that label and the musicianship is just extremely inspiring. And to see the space where a lot of that music was cut... It’s just like this dive basement and most modern studios you walk into and everything’s isolated and there’s like drop ceiling and sound paneling and foam, grey foam everywhere, which I don’t … “Why?” Someone sells that shit, that decided that’s a good idea for studios, I don't know.

So basically in the Motown studio there’s like wood, reflective wood panels that are about waist high and the purpose of it is to reflect the sound so that it’s more exciting sounding for the musicians. So there’s more bounce-back and more bleed so that the bass player and the drummer and the piano player hear the shit, hear what everyone’s playing in, play excited, which is so the opposite of how music is recorded now. Now everything is recorded completely dead and isolated and how can we isolate everything as much as possible. But to me the idea is that everyone in the room should be in the fuckin’ room and really feeling it. Like if you’re not feeling it while you’re cutting it, no one’s ever going to feel it. For me that’s a take if like you’re in the room and everyone’s like, “Wow,” then you’re like, “OK, that’s the take.” But if you don’t feel that... and it’s usually the first take or the hundred and fiftieth take. You know what I mean? To me, I found that very inspiring.

The trick that we do is we play in the room until we have it and then we run the amps into like the basement into boxes or whatever. So you just change the cable in the back so the drums are recorded live in the room. Everything can be recorded live and have isolation so the drums don’t sound like crap but you’re still like in the head space and in the physical space of playing together. That’s kind of how we do it.

Todd L. Burns

With your vocals, it seems like, especially in terms of pop music at least, it’s definitely more in the background than into the foreground. I’m wondering if that’s a conscious decision or if that’s just something, that’s the way you always heard it? Like you’re listening to things growing up that kind of seeped in unconsciously.

Win Butler

Yeah, I don’t know. I think that’s just part of the deal of having a big band. It’s not really a conscious thing. I think that it’s important to try and go places that you can’t quite go yet. I would find it really boring to be in an Arcade Fire cover band, find it excruciating. So I’d rather fail at something more interesting.

Todd L. Burns

I guess that’s a nice segue to the next album which is kind of yet another turn and yet another situation where you’re trying to like move the band in a different direction, to have a new sound in a way. Obviously, the whole thing is coherent but the Reflektor, the album after that is very dance music indebted. Before you wrote that album, a lot of the band went to Haiti for the first time. And I feel like that country seemed to have a huge effect on everyone.

Win Butler

Yeah, I mean Régine’s family is from Haiti and so I kind of... it was a big influence just like kompa, hearing Haitian music when she was like a kid there was a big... I mean we have a song called “Haiti” on Funeral which is kind of indebted to kompa music.

So it’s like something that’s kind of been in the DNA of the band pretty much from the beginning. But it’s a different story... the first time Régine and I both went there, we went there with this guy named Paul Farmer who’s an incredible doctor, so we went to rural Haiti. For me that was... I had never been to... I still have never been to Africa. But for me that was my first real... rural Haiti is a really incredible place. For me it felt like being in a time machine, going to the Delta in the south 80 years ago or something. For me it was a really profound experience. I met a lot of really amazing musicians. For the kind of later part of my life, probably one of the main influences on me, personally, just the music and the culture of Haiti.

Todd L. Burns

What is it about that music? I mean is there something you can pinpoint that just is so interesting to you? So compelling?

Win Butler

One of the things that really moved me in Haiti was hearing rara music for the first time which is kind of street music in Haiti but it’s played on monophonic horns. A lot of times now its PVC pipe, so it’s like lots of different PVC pipes so instead of one horn player it’s like spread out over ten players. So, “duh duh duh do do do do do do” like more monophonic and usually some kind of... depending on what people have, it’s like pieces of metal or congas or djembe you know, kind of whatever percussion. Yeah, I could play some of that if you guys want. This is a group that I saw the first time I went to carnival in Haiti, they’re called Rara Fom. Actually, I think they just changed their name to Simbie Roots but they’re an all female rara group and if you speak French, the lyrics are pretty amazing too. I’ll play that. Oh, let me try that again.

(music: Simbie Roots – “Unknown Track”)

They should be here, actually, because I’d been trying to help the woman who started that band. It’s so hard to do shit in Haiti. It’s really, really difficult because this is all ripped from YouTube, essentially, because it’s just so difficult, she’s been ripped off so many times. Anyone who’s ever recorded her music has stolen the masters. It’s just the actual logistics of trying to... even if you’re a great band in Haiti, it’s just like this whole extra level and so I’ve been trying to get her master tapes to be able to make a compilation of all their stuff to be able to put it out and it’s been like two years and it still hasn’t been possible, even with a lot of effort, it’s like there's so many extra hurdles beyond just...

Imagine 20 women dressed like Salt-N-Pepa but crazy, full body paint playing African drums in the street. You’re like, “What the fuck is this.” It’s like, puts most bands you see just to absolute shame. If they played after a showcase at South by Southwest, the previous band would be like, “Fuck, we should quit,” because it’s like 20 people, everyone’s dancing, everyone’s singing, everyone plays percussion. You'll just be like, “OK, we’re not actually a band.”

Todd L. Burns

You put a lot of money back into Haiti through charity work that you’ve done. Obviously, Régine, you have this familial connection to the country, but what is it about this particular country, this particular cause that means so much to you?

Win Butler

I think that we have so much to learn from Haiti. Every time I come back, a lot of things that we’ve kind of thrown by the wayside, Haiti has kind of kept and preserved. I see it almost as a... even a lot of like specific African rhythms that in different parts of Haiti, they’ve kind of preserved a lot of these really old musical traditions and it’s just so deep and so rich and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of all the amazing shit there. We were kind of giving a dollar a ticket, a dollar per ticket live to Haiti years before the earthquake and then the earthquake happened which... I mean, Katrina was horrible but I think 5,000 people, maybe 2,000 people died in Katrina and 300,000 people died in the earthquake in Haiti. It’s like the population of Laval in one second. The whole nursing hospital collapsed with all the nursing students in the entire country. There’s no nurses because all the nurses died. It’s kind of a level, for a place that was already the poorest in the hemisphere. I know it was a while ago now but still, I think it’ll be 50 years before they could ever truly rebuild. There’s just an infinite amount of work to do and so any little crap that we’re able to do is a drop in the ocean but it’s like I feel constantly ashamed that I’m not doing more, basically.

Todd L. Burns

We have a video from Haiti, just to give you kind of a sense of a visual. Maybe we should take a look at it.

(video: Arcade Fire – “Here Comes The Night Time” live at Artists Institute, Haiti)

Todd L. Burns

That was you performing a song off Reflektor, “Here Comes the Night Time”. It was live at the Artist’s Institute.

Win Butler

Yeah, it’s a really cool... That’s in Jacmel, which is in southern Haiti and friends of ours that started a film school there and it’s really, really cool. It’s free tuition sponsored by donation. We helped them open a recording studio so now there’s a recording academy and people doing sound and not too dissimilar from what's going on upstairs, to be honest. It’s a really cool program. We basically built the studio because we got offered to license our song to this movie that we said no to a million times and then eventually they were like, “We’ll give you ten times the amount to Haiti,” and we’re like, “Yes, that’s fine.” They just cut the check to the Artist’s Institute and they built a recording studio that people will probably use for 50 years and make amazing records. (applause) They’ll use it all day, all night for 50 years. Not one second will there not be someone recording all day, all night because it’s kind of the only fucking studio so...

Todd L. Burns

Seems like carnival and Haiti and New Orleans... seems like this is a huge inspiration for you at the moment.

Win Butler

Well, Régine and I bought a place in New Orleans about two years ago so we kind of split time between Montréal and New Orleans... kind of a “best of North America” plan. When we were writing The Suburbs we did a road trip from Houston and New Orleans because I wanted to show Régine my hometown and everything. The first time we drove through Lafayette on the way to New Orleans and we stopped and we went to a crazy zydeco bar... it’s like this exact hybrid of Haitian and French Canadian. Régine’s like, Haitian descent, grew up in Montréal, black kids in cowboy hats playing accordion and speaking Creole and she’s like, “What’s going on?” This exact hybrid of her upbringing. I grew up in Houston so for us it’s a place we both feel very at home but for different reasons.

It’s a really vibrant... music just runs that town in a way that’s very inspiring. Music is the mayor. Crazy stuff happens... I mean the other day in New Orleans right now there’s a Black Lives Matter protest to try and get rid of these monuments, Confederate soldier monuments that are all over the city, and they were like, “We’re going to tear down this monument if you don’t take it down by this date.” A bunch of protesters went with ropes and the New Orleans police department roped it off. David Duke was there doing a counter protest. That was like yesterday... crazy. Fuck Donald Trump. (applause)

Please register to vote today everyone, please. I know that it’s not ideal, but Hillary Clinton will be a great president. Donald Trump is a complete fuckin’ nightmare and a clown and a joke. It really is an extremely important election. You don’t have to hang out with Hillary, but Jesus Christ, vote for Hillary Clinton and just everyone register. It could not be heavier. The consequences can’t be more dire.

Todd L. Burns

Tell me a little bit more about New Orleans and music and your connection to that.

Win Butler

When I first started visiting there I met this guy, Ben Jaffe, his parents started Preservation Hall which is in the French Quarter. It’s a pretty inspiring story. When people complain about cultural appropriation and gentrification, which is an extremely important thing to be aware of and to talk about, but a Jewish couple from Cleveland that moved to New Orleans in the ’50s and they’re like, “Oh, it’s really weird that there’s no venues that black musicians are allowed to play in the French Quarter. We should have a place where black musicians are allowed to play and that is racially blind and people can come watch.” They did it and it’s still there.

It’s really inspiring. It’s like the really old guard of all the old jazz guys and all this incredibly rich musicianship, all passes through the Preservation Hall. He’s like one of my best friends in New Orleans. You can get as deep... particularly during carnival in New Orleans, if you close your eyes you’re in Haiti. There’s so much deep music stuff going on. It’s really incredible. I was kind of joking about “Haiti with Whole Foods,” but it really is kind of the only city in America for me. I didn’t think I would ever live in the States again after moving to Canada because I believe in healthcare and childhood education and I don’t think gun control should even be something we should be arguing about in this day and age. I feel less insane being in Montréal but New Orleans is just so deep, incredible.

Todd L. Burns

You feel less insane living in New Orleans when you’re...

Win Butler

Yeah, everything feels normal there.

Todd L. Burns

... and crazy at the same time.

Win Butler

Only New Orleans is real, the rest is done with mirrors.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t we take a look at that video of New Orleans.

Win Butler

Oh, yeah, so this is kind of a good example. David Bowie, like I said, David came to some of our first shows. He sings on Reflektor. Talk about meeting your heroes, just such a deep, deep source of inspiration on so many levels. I think when he passed away, I don’t think anyone was really prepared for it. Millions of people are all of the sudden like, “Why are there less colors in the universe?” There’s a tradition in New Orleans of parading... funeral parades, second line when people pass away. Ben suggested that the Preservation Hall do one and asked me if I would help with it. We got a parade permit, which is pretty easy to do in New Orleans. We got a parade permit for 200 people. We announced it and 12,000 people came. Everyone was dressed like David Bowie. It was just like only 24 hours notice, insane, no amplification, 12,000 people and just a brass band. It was the punkiest shit I’ve ever participated in. It was so crazy. That was just because David touched so many people on so many different levels. I think that’s what that video is.

(video: Arcade Fire’s David Bowie Tribute Parade)

Régine wanted to play a keytar and so we found a dude that has a shopping cart with a speaker with batteries that you push so she plugged it in. It was like these really cheesy sounds. It sounded like crap and then she found a bass and it was like, “OK, that will work.” We tried to push it out. There’s 12,000 people in the street and she tries to, we pushed it out and it’s like, we’re not even, we’re trying to push through the people, and she’s trying to play this keytar, and the cable keeps getting pulled out, and I was like, “Forget the keytar, it’s not happening. There’s no way.” Then it’s just like, “bzz, bzz”, oh shit. Never mind, play the fucking keytar. It was so cool. It was so crazy. Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

Before we open up to questions, it’s been a while since the last album. I’m wondering if you guys are recording, if you guys are ready to release something, if you have a direction in mind, is New Orleans an inspiration? Are there other inspirations that are feeding into what you’re doing right now?

Win Butler

We released a record like a year ago, we just called it something else and no one liked it, so it kind of disappeared. So, we broke up.

Todd L. Burns

So you’re no longer together.

Win Butler

No.

Todd L. Burns

Boy. That’s a bummer.

Win Butler

Maybe next Coachella.

Todd L. Burns

So there’s no new record on the horizon until you get the band back together.

Win Butler

Yeah, I mean well presumably our manager will be playing the bass, and...

Todd L. Burns

You’re going to have to find a new drummer.

Win Butler

I’ve always been really inspired by the Clash and I want to make our Cut the Crap, you know? That joke, no one knows what Cut the Crap is? I love that. The Clash, which is one of the greatest bands of all time, one of my favorite bands, and they kind of started fighting, and I think they kicked out Mick Jones and the drummer. So it was like the manager, bringing the songs, no one even remembers it because it was such a piece of crap record, but it was the last Clash record. Like, nope, not the Clash. I don’t even think anyone even takes it as a Clash record. Yeah, that’s what we’re going for.

Todd L. Burns

Cut the Crap 2.

Win Butler

It’s not as funny when you have to describe what you’re talking about. Cut the Crap, maybe we will call it Cut the Crap 2.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t we open it up to questions from the audience. If you just don’t mind waiting for a microphone.

Audience Member

Hi.

Win Butler

How’s it going.

Audience Member

Could you tell us maybe a little bit about your creative process of scoring Spike Jonze’s movie Her, with Owen Pallett and how you approached this movie?

Win Butler

Totally. Spike has been a friend for many years. We met him touring. I think, when he was doing Where the Wild Things Are, he was playing Funeral a lot. That was kind of the unofficial soundtrack of the film for his actors and stuff like that. We met him back then. We did a film together, a short film for The Suburbs. When we were writing Reflektor still and he had been writing Her for a long time, and we were talking about the music, and I was suggesting directions it could go. I was just like, “We should just do the soundtrack. It would be so much easier.” I don’t think it had even occurred to him, even though it was extremely obvious.

It was intense, because we were doing it, Reflektor’s a double record, and we did the Her soundtrack at the same time, in the middle of doing the Reflektor record. Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

Wasn’t Régine pregnant, also? At the same time?

Win Butler

Régine was pregnant. Yeah. We were mixing a double record and trying to record a film soundtrack at the same time. I don’t recommend it. It was so stressful. My brother really kind of took the reins for the whole end process for a lot of it. It was a really cool... it’s interesting with the film because it’s Spike’s film. Everything’s so delineated, you go, “Why is he in film world? The director! Everyone does whatever the fucking director says.” There’s no like, “But I’m the cinematographer, we should do...” It’s like, “Nope. Director.” It’s funny, someone who has no music language, trying to direct a band. Like, “Make it more like this.” And you’re like, “That means nothing to me.”

Todd L. Burns

What were some of the directions that he was giving you? Was he like, “More yellow.”

Win Butler

Yeah, I wish I could remember. It was way more vague than that. More yellow I could work with. I’d be like, “OK. Coming right up. More yellow.”

Todd L. Burns

Was it also hard to write in terms of like, timing? I mean did you have to like, shorten songs or get things in a way that you hadn’t been used to in that sense?

Win Butler

Some of the major pieces, like the sex scene in the film is kind of roughly based around a song called “Porno,” melodically, that’s on Reflektor. The end credits song, there’s a song, an unreleased Arcade Fire song called “Dimensions”, that was the jumping off point, at least for the chords. I think a couple of the key scenes, the song “On a Beach” was like a thing that Régine wrote. It was very collaborative. In a way it was a great pressure release, because a record is just so about the songs, and a soundtrack is so just about the picture. You have to just be really subservient to whatever the picture is. I think one of my favorite soundtracks of all time is the Cohen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. No music. The Cohen brothers are such music directors, and that they temped up all the music and took it all out. I remember watching that film, just like white knuckles, like, “When is the fucking music going to start, oh my God.”

To me the director could do that and I would be totally at peace with it. You’re just like the guy working on the orc village for Lord of the Rings. For like nine months, and they’re like, “No orc village.” You’re like, “Nooooo! That was 15,000 people working for nine months, oh my God! Why!? My children haven’t seen me in nine months. Please keep the orc village.”

Todd L. Burns

Are there any other questions?

Audience Member

I just wanted to ask you about being inside a band format in today’s music climate. Two questions. Firstly, what do you think Arcade Fire would look like if it started in this decade? Also, how do you guys strive to keep being innovative as a band?

Win Butler

When we were putting the band together, the first lineup... It’s always just who are the most talented, most creative people that you can find to play with. That you’re inspired by, that do things that you’re like, “Yes, that’s cool.” But there’s an element of also chance to the first lineup of the band. It’s like, “Oh, we’re in the same film class. You play music? Cool let’s play music together.” So a lot of times you end up in a band... Everyone in a band are a bunch of weirdos always anyway. You have to be the same genre of weirdo to commit your life to be in that kind of relationship with a bunch of other people. When that kind of combusted, I’d always played music with my brother, I’m just like, “Who are the most talented people I know?” Richard, who’s in the band, and Tim, my brother, and Régine. OK, that’s the band. It was like, who are literally the most... everyone in the band is more skilled than I am at every instrument. Everyone in the band could be leading their own band and do... To me that’s kind of what’s interesting about it.

It’s kind of boring to watch a band where everyone likes each other and everything’s cool and no one argues. It’s kind of, the whole thing is about tension and about... Yeah. I don’t want the Rolling Stones to like each other. Give me a break. It would be so boring. I don’t know. That’s the tough thing. It’s about friction. That’s the source of what’s interesting about a band. Which is a tough thing to keep going for a long time.

If we were doing it today... The bummer about today, trying to do it today, is that when we were starting, I mentioned selling 10,000 records. That’s kind of an arbitrary number, but that was, in my mind, you could quit your day job if you sold 10,000 records and you were in a band, you could subsist. Particularly if you’re in Canada and you get a grant every once in a while to make art. That was the line, where you could be in a band, and you didn’t have to work in a sandwich shop or in a call center, on the side. Which, that’s the sad thing about the kind of Spotify world that we’re in. It’s that that has been completely eviscerated, that’s never coming back, it’s gone forever. Because 10,000 streams is $0.25, which 10,000 records is enough to be in a band and do it seriously. That kind of weird economy, the whole thing, that’s the really tough one for me. That’s the thing that I continue to have a problem with, with the whole model of the infinite content model that we’re in now. Which I’ll let you know when I figure that one out. I think it would be hard, but I’d like to think we would kind of just do the same thing.

Todd L. Burns

When you put out Reflektor, it was very much an album release, you created a lot of interest and did some mysterious things, built up this sort of like mythos. It seems like in a way it was kind of a love letter to that kind of thing, especially today when the surprise album drop is the thing. When you release Cut the Crap 2, what do you think that looks like?

Win Butler

That’s a working title by the way. We haven’t committed to that. We could change it when it drops tomorrow.

Todd L. Burns

Are you still in love with that kind of build up, that kind of this album release, drips and drabs?

Win Butler

I don’t think any of it fucking matters that much in ten years because a good record is a good record. I do think that there’s, as a fan, there is a period before a record that has come out where you’re willing to make a leap into the... Because there’s no music videos, I mean there are but, the music video used to be an extension of the record. It’s like an LP, you have album artwork. You could get lost in the album artwork. The CD, the album artwork is crap, so you have video. The video is the extension of the world of a record.

You know I’ve been trying to get iTunes to not just have a PDF for ten years for album artwork. Like you have an iPad or a phone you should be able to do something amazing with the album artwork. It would be so fucking easy to do something cool. It’s been almost ten years. I’m like, “Hey, can we please make something that isn’t a PDF for album artwork? I think it’s important.” But you know they’re a tech company, they don’t give a shit. They could care less about that particular detail. I don’t know.

Todd L. Burns

Is there a question over here?

Audience Member

Going back to Reflektor, how did James Murphy come into the picture and what was that dynamic like?

Win Butler

James … our guitarist Richie had a party at his loft and I remember hearing “House of Jealous Lovers” by the Rapture, someone played that, and then Fela Kuti “Zombie” back to back. It was the first time I had heard either of those records, it was like in 2001 or something. To me it was like when I had never watched The Godfather, and I watched The Godfather and then Fargo. I was like, “Movies are fucking amazing. Oh my God, cinema, yeah.” “No, those are outliers you know.”

That was my first awareness of James as a producer and hearing that track. I was like, “This came from today? Wow.” In the back of my head, because that doesn’t happen very often where you hear something that really kind of hits you in the face. We toured together on Neon Bible, LCD opened for us and we did a split 7" together. We looked at it from somewhat of a similar place, he was kind of like a sound guy, we came more from indie world. He came to visit us before we were making Neon Bible, we were actually talking about working on Neon Bible together. But he was still in LCD and it never worked out. That was the one moment where he was free, we were working on a record and the stars aligned. It kind of had been in the works for a while.

Todd L. Burns

What did he bring to Reflektor?

Win Butler

A lot, I think every record... I mean it was nice having someone that wasn’t me or Régine, having an opinion about the way something sounds. I think James is essentially an engineer at heart. He loves setting up all the mics for his monitors and he’s very technical, like drum micing. A song like “Here Comes the Night Time”, it’s not necessarily the song you think James worked on that he worked on. He mixed “Awful Sound,” which doesn’t sound like a James Murphy record at all. That’s the one that he mixed on the record, it’s not necessarily like, “We played dance music, James did it.” It’s not that straightforward. Any opportunity to hang out with James and work on music, I think he’s somewhat of a kindred spirit. I'm excited to hear whatever he does next to be honest.

Audience Member

Good evening. I have a sore throat so I don’t know if my voice sounds okay over there.

Win Butler

It sounds amazing.

Audience Member

OK, thank you. Regarding the United States and the elections and all that, I’m not a big Star Wars fan but I know what the Death Star is and I kind of think the function of the United States, not just in recent years but since before I was born, has had a very destructive tendency. With that being said I don’t think it matters who you put in the cockpit, so to speak, because the purpose of the Death Star is to obliterate things. I’ve observed that in the American population, people think having a choice between two different brands of evil is okay. I think people, not just in the US but globally, need to reject that routine. I don’t think it’s the most enlightening course of action to constantly choose between two brands of evil every four years or however many times it comes around.

Win Butler

Yeah, I mean I definitely share that perspective. But I think there’s a lot of inmates in private prisons in Louisiana that would probably feel much differently about the outcome of the election. There’s a lot of kids that will not have access to healthcare and to education, there’s like millions and millions and millions of people whose lives will, the practical day to day of their lives will be extremely shaped by... I mean that’s my counter argument.

Audience Member

Yeah, that’s absolutely true. But I think long term...

Win Butler

But I agree there’s definitely, the system is a complete farce. It’s insane. The US does a lot evil in the world and has for a long time. That’s pretty obvious, I think, to anyone with a brain.

Audience Member

Yeah, people should go to the sources.

Win Butler

Yeah, and so is Canada. You know? I mean, so have a lot of places, but the US is tough.

Audience Member

Hi, how are you?

Win Butler

I’m great.

Audience Member

I have two questions, more or less related to each other. You mention about in the earlier days where you had to write a lot of things and scrapping all of them over and over again. How did you come to terms with your writing over the years? And the second one is, I watched a video of a live performance of “Ready to Start” where you have two drummers, was it a natural progression or was it a choice in expanding the live performance or probably perhaps, “Fuck yeah, we can have as many drummers as we want now.”

Win Butler

I think one of the strengths of the band is that a lot of people play bass. We have two drummers and three bass players. Depending on who’s playing what, the rhythm section can really shift and go in different directions and I think that there is kind of a cool, Régine kind of playing the cymbals and Jeremy playing the back beat, it was just kind of like a hybrid feel that really worked on some songs. It’s just like another kind of quill in that arrow depending on what the song … I mean, the way I look at it, it’s like the song, it’s almost like a visual thing to me if you’re performing it’s like: here’s the stage, here’s the performer, here’s the audience, and the song is kind of in the middle. When it works, everyone meets in the middle of the song cause that’s what you’re all kind of serving is the song essentially.

In terms of writing, I just think you have to write so much crap. We had a rule early in my band that … we were using a lot of guitar pedals and effects and we made a rule that you couldn’t use delay, you couldn’t use any guitar pedals for like five years. It was just a rule that we came to because it was distracting. It was like making you … if you need to put a bunch of crap on it to mask the fact that the song isn’t maybe quite as good as it should be. I feel like that kind of step was important. We’re just not being satisfied. It’s not the best personality trait but it is just never feeling satisfied. It’s kind of how I feel all the time.

Todd L. Burns

There’s a question up there.

Audience Member

Hello. I wanted to ask you. A common thread that I’ve noticed in the three lectures we’ve had so far is the idea of having a really high bar and being in an environment where you can listen to other musicians who you think are better than you and, how you say, “I gotta get back to work.” Not compromising in that and having a healthy competition sort of thing. Not in, like you said, an adversarial way. What do you think for you in your experience, important instances like social gatherings or social things that really help bring a song together where that is put in the forefront, I don’t know if I’m expressing myself …

Win Butler

In Montréal, there was a band called Da Bloody Gashes. They were kind of like a noise, punk band. They later became a band called AIDS Wolf, which is a pretty offensive name for a band, but they threw these … it was just an apartment, someone’s apartment, and they would do these shows. That’s where I first saw the Unicorns. Every band would play them and it was five dollars or it was free if you brought a can of food. It was like a food drive thing for the Food Bank. It was just a very punk little thing but it was such a diverse group.

So much talent came through that one little weird apartment and they did all the silk screens for all the shows. It really takes someone like that and a scene that is willing to throw shows and not be super closed minded to who gets to play them ’cause something you might think is crap might be the best thing ever.

When I first heard Grimes in Montréal, from when we were starting, here’s this girl who’s inspired by Mariah Carey. In Montréal, you’re like, “I like Mariah Carey” would not fly. But her music was so great and force of her personality. Someone needs to throw the party and there has to be some music there and not just drugs ’cause drugs … it gets really boring if it’s just that. Like super boring. People think it’s really interesting and it’s super boring.

Todd L. BUrns

Are there any other questions? Someone over here?

Audience Member

It’s probably a nerd question. Nerd question. Talking about Reflektor. It has been recorded also on tape and which type of recorder?

Win Butler

Yeah it was recorded on tape. The song “Reflektor” we worked on … it was one of the first things we started with James and we worked on it for about six months. It was good but it wasn’t that good. I probably have a rough mix of it somewhere. It was okay.

We were kind of not breaking through on it so we decided … we threw a party. We did this elaborate hoax where we pretended it was another band at a recording studio. It was in a loft building. We set up this fake stage, this is the lengths you have to go now. It’s insane. But we set up a fake stage and we were in the other room and my brother and Richie came out in masks and pretended to be the band and played this horrible reggae kind of thing. So everyone thought this was the show and half the people were like, “This is awful. I’m out of here.” Half the people were like, “OK I could get into...” You know. “Yeah. I could get into this.” Then we had... Then they started a conga line. We were already playing in the next room. Everyone came in, and we were already playing. We played half of Reflektor live. It was the first time playing it in front of anyone. This is before we even cut the record. Really, we were halfway done. We played it, and we were like, “OK, that’s how that goes.” The next day we... 12 musicians, live, two percussionists, sax... just cut it in a day. Threw away the six months that we had worked on the previous thing, and that’s what the song is.

Audience Member

Thanks.

Win Butler

Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

Any other questions?

Audience Member

Hi, obviously you’ve had a really important influence with innovative musicians in your family that have helped shaped you. Do you think if you’d have grown up in a non-musical family, you’d be trying to strive for the same things? Would you even be making music?

Win Butler

I don’t know. It’s all such a weird hodge-podge. Régine, neither of her parents played music, but she was teaching herself classical musical at three on a keyboard in the basement. I think after Funeral came out her dad was like, “Oh, you play music?” “Yeah, dad, that’s all I do... all day, every day. I’m kind of a savant.” I don’t know what it is. I’ve intentionally tried not to get any better at guitar. I was probably better at guitar when I was 15 then I am now. Nirvana came out when I was 15. I was like, “OK, fuck guitar solos. Thank God.” Only sarcastic guitar solos. I think that liberated me from having to think that I had to be good at my instrument. I don’t know. It probably gave me... I knew I would do it if I wanted to. I never was like, “Oh, can I be a musician?” I didn’t have to grapple with that existential question that I think some people are like, “Am I allowed to do this?” I’m not sure.

Todd L. Burns

Any more questions?

Audience Member

Maybe one final more. You talked earlier about starting to play by entering from inside the crowd and being closer to the crowd and then elevating on the stage. Obviously, that’s a little hard now for most of the gigs you play. There was another band in the Bay Area called Metallica who sort of had a similar approach a little while ago.

Win Butler

What is that? Metala-what?

Audience Member

How do you keep checking yourself as your career goes along to prevent from becoming some kind of monster?

Win Butler

Lots of therapy. (laughs) I think the group therapy really helps keep us grounded. I don’t know. Someone’s always going to think what you do is crap. I don’t know. I think that if you’re an artist you’re just going to do it. You’re just going to do it especially if it’s crap. Yeah, I don’t think David Bowie was like, “I’m going to Berlin because I’m...” I think it’s easy to mythologize a lot of this stuff but you’re just kind of following wherever it goes.

I have no interest in being in a really shitty, boring, famous rock band. It’s not interesting to me at all. I honestly don’t think we could take it. I think we would probably break up if we made a really shitty record, I think we would just completely self-combust. I just think... you know, if we made a truly crap record we’d be like, “OK, bye, we’re done.” It’s hard to say because people still want to hear old people play old songs so that’ll probably always be the case.

Todd L. Burns

Is it still fun to play all of these old songs... the songs you’ve written ten, 15 years ago?

Win Butler

Yeah, I think there was a moment... it can feel... we were really, really lucky to never have a hit of any kind in any imagination of what a hit could be. I think there’s an energy. I’ve been to shows, if someone has a song that’s on the radio, and everyone’s just waiting for them to play that song and then they play the song and then, “OK, I’m out of here.” We never had that, at all, not even close. I mean “Wake Up,” we didn’t play that for many tours. We did a whole Reflektor tour where we only played songs off Reflektor and no one at the end was like, “Why didn’t you play ‘Wake Up’?” Our fans aren’t really like that and also, it was a great show and it probably didn’t even occur to anyone that we didn’t play “Wake Up” because it was a really good show.

I think that we were lucky. It’s either like you’re Prince and you have a million billion hits or you have zero hits. I think the middle ground would be really tedious. I don’t think we’re going to do the Prince thing because we already missed the boat on having a billion hits. When the Pixies reunited and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, this song. Oh, right, cool, this song. Oh, amazing, they’re playing this song. Oh, I forgot about this song, this song. Oh, that’s a really cool song.” There’s not a Pixie song that they could play that I’d be sad they’re playing. I like pretty much every Pixie song. Maybe one or two I don’t like.

Todd L. Burns

Cool, well, please help me thanking Win Butler.

Win Butler

Thank you. (applause)