Arcade Fire’s Will Butler Writing Song a Day Based on Guardian News Stories Next Week
Arcade Fire‘s Will Butler will release his debut solo album, Policy, on March 10. But before that, he’ll be writing a new song based on a news story in The Guardian every day for a week beginning February 23, as The Guardian has announced. The tracks will be posted on the Guardian’s site.
“It was partly inspired by Bob Dylan, who used to announce that certain songs were based on headlines,” Butler said. “It would be a song he wrote in two weeks or something, such as ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, which is one of the greatest songs ever. So I’ve set myself an impossible bar.”
He added: “It’s a cruel thing, but sometimes you read something and think, ‘Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that.’ Something like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn trial – my God, that’s the gnarliest story in the world, but it’s interesting. Or you might read a science headline and think, ‘The universe is so much bigger than I thought it was.’ There’s something really beautiful in that.”
(Here’s a headline I humbly suggest for a song: “Group dinners are terrible. It’s time we all admit it”. Fertile terrain!)
Elsewhere in The Guardian‘s interview, he said that when Arcade Fire were recording their 2013 album, Reflektor, at NYC’s Electric Lady studio, David Bowie popped in for an impromptu visit. “He’s lovely, the best smelling human I’ve ever smelt,” Butler said. Let your mind fill in the blanks.
Read our new interview with Butler, and check out the video for “Anna” below:
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