Arcade Fire’s Will Butler Releases Policy Deluxe Edition

Arcade Fire‘s Will Butler has released a digital deluxe edition of his debut solo album, Policy. It includes the songs from his news-themed song project, in which he created one song based on a Guardian news story once a day for a week. It’s available via iTunes, Google Play, and Spotify; you can stream it below. 

As previously reported, Butler’s Guardian project included a song about ISIS destroying a museum in Mosul (“By the Waters of Babylon”) a song about the Greek debt crisis (“Clean Monday”), a song about anti-apartheid figure Moses Kotane and Ukrainian separatists celebrating a holiday (“Waving Flag”), a song about the water crisis in São Paulo, Brazil (“You Must Be Kidding“), and a song about a newly discovered black hole (“Madonna Can’t Save Me Now”).

In a press release, Butler described the Guardian project:

I love the news. I listen to the news more than I listen to new music. Artistically, I currently care more for craftsmanship than for virtuosity. A newspaper is daily full of fearless craftsmanship—writers working with (hopefully) great precision on hard deadlines. They sign their name to articles—and then have little control over where those articles appear, how they’re edited, or even what the headline will be. Fearless! And the editors—always producing, cutting, re-mixing. I love it.

I wrote each of these songs in one day for the Guardian newspaper. Each was based on a news story from that day’s paper. I wrote the music and lyrics starting in the morning at 7 a.m. I engineered the sessions myself, mixed the song, and then emailed it to the UK at 3 p.m. my time. (For this release, I had the songs properly mixed by Mark Lawson.)

It’s a funny time for recorded music. Weirdly, while hard physical media disappear, the music itself is more permanent than ever—always discoverable, searchable, comparable. Nothing is lost these days—every ephemeral moment captured and stored. All etched in stone instead of vinyl. But it’s etched in a stone that people are driving past at 100 miles an hour. These songs embrace that world. My dream is that as you tear past these songs, some one of them will catch your ear and stay with you. You’ll remember it as some noticeable feature of the landscape of your recently-present world. A world familiar but already far behind.

Read our interview with Butler.

Watch Butler perform “Witness” at Pitchfork’s SXSW party:

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