The other day, Win Butler and Regine Chassagne of Arcade Fire were redecorating their home in Montreal and listening to In Utero, the album Nirvana recorded amid the vertigo induced by sudden and confounding success. They got to thinking about how they were now headlining some of the same huge venues that Nirvana played after Nevermind, which Chassagne finds a “head trip.”
“There’s definitely three songs on In Utero that are like, ‘Hey jocks! Stop listening to our music! Go away!’” Butler says.
Does he ever feel like that?
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“Yeah, of course. You want to be able to relate to what you’re doing. But,” he says with a tentative smile, “so far, so good.”
Arcade Fire hasn’t yet released an album as unnervingly huge as Nevermind, but its third, The Suburbs, continues the band’s upward trajectory, debuting at No. 1 in both the US and UK. Having headlined Madison Square Garden and London’s O2, the band will do the same in London’s Hyde Park in June.
The group won the Grammy’s top prize, album of the year, on Sunday, and on Tuesday it took home Brit music awards for international group and international album of the year. Furthermore, its music has a certain questing grandeur and cultural weight that has people talking in terms of U2 and “next levels” and “bigness,” all of which leaves the band feeling a little nonplussed.
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“I don’t know if it’s a British thing, the biggest-band-in-the-world competition,” Butler muses. “It’s something that wasn’t ingrained in any of us. I don’t have a ‘We’re going to do this and be No. 1’ attitude.”
“New and improved! 33 percent more strings!” Chassagne laughs.
“It’s really a lot easier to get smaller,” Butler says, unfurling a broad grin that almost transforms his face from gloomy and austere to movie-star handsome. “That’s definitely not hard.”
It’s a winter’s day in Montreal and the snow lies so thick that the car park outside Arcade Fire’s building is buried under a 3m-deep drift. Inside the band’s top-floor office, which looks less like a place of work than a bohemian crash pad, complete with beds and racks of thrift-store vinyl, the mood is cheerful, largely thanks to a wise decision to take two months off. Butler, 30 and a looming 1.93m, wears a T-shirt that reads “I don’t know,” a slogan from Scenes From the Suburbs, the short film the band just made with Spike Jonze, and which premiered at the Berlin film festival last week. Chassagne, 33, literally dances into the room, her curls bouncing.
As they sit down to falafels and bowls of soup, they are both funnier and more relaxed than Arcade Fire’s earnest reputation suggests. “I’m not a particularly serious person,” Butler insists. (Later, I ask multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry whether Butler’s occasional habit of goading the audience reveals a fierce desire to forge an emotional connection. “Yeah,” he concedes hesitantly. “And he just likes to fuck with people.”)
In front of a dictaphone, Chassagne needs to gather momentum, like a spinning top. An answer will either wobble and stop or spin and spin. Butler is less extreme, but you can instantly tell whether or not a question has engaged him. The couple’s responses, like their music, are all or nothing.
When they met in Montreal in 2000, they were from different worlds. Edwin Farnham Butler III was the son of a geologist and a harpist: born in California, raised in the Houston planned community that inspired much of The Suburbs, and educated at the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Chassagne was the daughter of Haitian immigrants who fled “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s murderous Tonton Macoutes in the 1960s.
“My mom was traumatized,” Chassagne says. “As a child, I sensed that something really terrible had happened there. Four years old at the table: Man, the adults are talking about Haiti. Six years old, seven, eight: Wow, this problem hasn’t been solved yet? … I don’t think I had a meal where I didn’t have to think about those who didn’t have that, so I should finish my plate.”
Butler always knew a career in music was possible. (His maternal grandfather was the electric guitar pioneer Alvino Rey; his mother not only played the harp but sang backing vocals for the likes of Frank Sinatra.) Chassagne wanted to study music, but chose a communications degree as a compromise because her parents were worried she wouldn’t make a living as a musician. On the song Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), a synth-pop anthem that is the Arcade Fire song even people who don’t like Arcade Fire like, she sings: “I started singing and they told me to stop/Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.”
If she hadn’t met Butler she would still have made music, but never in a rock band. “My mom took difficult job after difficult job, just to work, so to me music was never a hobby. I didn’t want to be in a band to be cool and make friends. It was a serious thing.” But Butler impressed her. “Win was the first person I ever spoke to who was as much into music as I was. There was something in the way he was talking that intrigued me. I couldn’t tell exactly what,” she says with a laugh, while her husband looks bashful.
“I had less than no idea of what I was going to find when I moved here,” says Butler, who came to study scriptural interpretation at McGill University. “I was really blindsided by the city. In Montreal there’s weird dance shows and loft parties. It’s less about venues and more about people doing their own thing.”
Their two partnerships, romantic and musical, evolved in tandem. On the night of their first date they wrote a song together, Headlights Look Like Diamonds. Arcade Fire already existed in an early incarnation but gradually, says Butler, the couple became the “center of gravity.” “The music we had been marked by was very different. Both of our worlds got a lot larger.”
Listening to Headlights Look Like Diamonds on their eponymous 2003 EP, it’s striking how many of Arcade Fire’s themes were there from the very start — cars, the suburbs, disaster — but it wasn’t until halfway through making its debut album, 2004’s Funeral, that the band’s sound fell into place. The turning point was Neighbourhood #2 (Laika). “It was the first time I could hit play and say, ‘Yeah, that’s roughly what I’ve been talking about,’” Butler says. “It sounded like what it was supposed to sound like.”
Part of the process was building the right lineup: Parry, Tim Kingsbury, Jeremy Gara, Sarah Neufeld and Butler’s younger brother Will. Although coordinating seven personalities can be challenging, it gives Arcade Fire an unusually strong gang mentality — a mutual support structure. “It’s like how it’s easier to dance around your best friends,” Butler explains. “You get a group of people together and they either keep each other down or enable each other to cut loose. I think we give each other permission to lose ourselves in the music.”
On stage, they generate a unique energy, both immediate and mysterious, reminiscent of the organized chaos of Neutral Milk Hotel as much as the expansive gestures of U2 or Bruce Springsteen. Parry says before they were well known, the band’s ethos was to “get in people’s faces and sing, make something rise up.”
We meet over hamburgers and fries at the counter of a tiny cafe. Parry’s late father, David Parry, was a folk singer and professor of medieval drama. His mother, Caroline Balderston Parry, is a poet and musician who raised him as a Quaker. With the Butlers’ Mormon roots (they are non-practicing) and Chassagne’s Catholicism, there’s a lot of religious diversity in Arcade Fire. “Growing up in a religious community [can give you the idea] that there’s something greater than you when there’s a bunch of you assembled,” says Parry. “That idea of a spirit moving through a group. It’s not just a bunch of dudes playing guitar solos — something that can’t be named happens. That’s kind of the prize.”
That wired fervor, so distant from indie rock’s standard options of irony, whimsy or mannered cool, makes it easy to overstate Arcade Fire’s righteous intensity. When I wonder if Butler’s fondness for apocalyptic imagery stems from religion, he says it had more to do with early exposure to John Milius’ cheesy 1980s action movie Red Dawn. At Exeter, his English teacher introduced him to movies such as Brazil and Blade Runner, and writers such as TS Eliot and George Orwell. His songwriting tends to use exaggerated scenarios and characters to get across his message. The Spike Jonze movie, which the Butler brothers
co-wrote, sets the usual adolescent rites of passage in a police state. “You start with an emotional truth and you can use a world to get at that feeling,” says Win Butler.
The band is interested in being principled without being purist. A year ago, shortly after the Haitian earthquake, the NFL wanted to use Wake Up during the Super Bowl. Arcade Fire broke its no-adverts rule and gave the money straight to disaster relief. “I don’t want people thinking about a Toyota when they hear Keep the Car Running, but in the Super Bowl situation we thought it would be unethical not to take the money,” says Butler. “Who can earn that kind of money for doing nothing?”
The band first started working with the charity Partners in Health around the time of Funeral. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), from The Suburbs, is named after a book about the charity. “I had a lot of questions,” Chassagne says, with a sigh. “What should I help with? You start thinking about all the issues in the world and I wasn’t the kind of person who just wanted to sign a petition. I actually wanted to do something.” She first visited Haiti in 2008 and returned with Butler after the earthquake. Like U2 and REM before them, the band is committed to long-term, nuts-and-bolts activism.
“I’ve always been sympathetic to people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty,” Win Butler says. “You meet all these people who are alive because of Partners in Health. It’s really good that someone followed through on this idea, and went through all the bullshit and red tape and garbage and depressing setbacks, and made this thing that could have not been real, but is real. It’s worth pursuing. It’s worth at least taking a shot.”
Parry calls Arcade Fire “the grain of pepper in the salt shaker. We don’t belong in this world, but we fell into it, and we will go into the middle of it and do what we do and put our hearts into it.” He shrugs and smiles. “Because that’s all we know how to do.”
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