31 Flavors, Mostly Bittersweet
Atop the Funeral Pyre with the Arcade Fire
Win Butler is living an indie boy's dream, with all its benefits and baggage. In the span of a mere 90 days, his band the Arcade Fire has catapulted from virtual anonymity outside the group's Montreal home base to being the toast of the alt-rock world. As Butler himself mockingly declared to kick off a recent sold-out New York showcase, "OK, we're the flavor of the month, let's go!" The Arcade Fire's live sets dominated the buzz of this fall's trendsetting CMJ Conference to such an extent that the New York Times built its front-page coverage of the four-day event around the band. Hate 'em yet? Well you shouldn't, because Funeral is a disc that lives up to the hype. I spoke to a tired but charming Butler en route to Boston's Logan Airport, heading for a cross country flight to launch the next leg of the Arcade Fire's ever-expanding tour.

Win's father was behind the wheel, having come to Maine to spend the holidays with Win and his younger brother Will (also a Firestarter) during some rare downtime. "We've been pretty much keeping everything rolling since we finished the record in May," Butler sighs. "I really had to push to get the record out by September," an unusually quick turnaround for general release these days. "The label wanted to do late October but I just couldn't get used to the idea of sitting on it for so long." It was worth the rush -- from the opening distorted piano notes of "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," Funeral announces itself with a majestic swoop that is at once original, personal, and yet so natural that it seems it's been present in your psyche for ages. Word of Funeral's bittersweet elegance spread like, well, wildfire, drawing comparisons to the poetic vision of Neutral Milk Hotel (although I hear closer similarities to the giddy experimentation of another Elephant 6 cornerstone, Olivia Tremor Control). Butler exudes a healthy mix of gratitude, bemusement and quiet confidence over his band's bust-out success. "We honestly didn't have any expectations going into this," he insists. "We figured if we sold two thousand discs we'd make our money back. But even when we had only a homemade demo out we got e-mail from people in France who had somehow heard it, so I knew having an actual recording would take it to a bigger scale."

The Butlers grew up north of Houston, and Win found his way to Montreal almost four years ago. "I kind of went there running away from college, but somehow I wound up finishing school there," he marvels, recalling how he "snuck away to school during the daytime" to McGill University (the Harvard of Canada, to some). "I'd been in New York and Boston for awhile and was looking for something different." He found a lot more -- he soon met Regine Chassagne, who became his close-knit musical collaborator and eventually, his wife. The two tinkered with the Arcade Fire in various forms for some time, hitting on the current configuration in mid-2003.

The Montreal music scene is proving particularly fertile these days, sowing the seeds first planted by weirdo genre-smashing outfit Godspeed You Black Emperor! "Godspeed's really done so much for the music community here," Butler effuses. "The bass player founded the two main venues where everybody plays, and we recorded most of the album at this great loft studio space, Hotel2Tango, they co-founded just a few blocks from my house. There's a lot of avant jazz and electronic music going on too. The city is sort of divvied up because of all the French language stuff -- it's a lot more segregated than you might hope." The mellow adopted Canadian isn't above a little Second City sniping, however. "There's a certain kind of person that wouldn't move to Toronto in a million years but comes to Montreal -- and those are the people I tend to like. Toronto's the base of the English speaking Canadian music and media industry, so anyone really aspiring goes to Toronto to try to hit it big."

Even a grassroots sensation needs a little help getting the word out, and landing on Merge Records gave Funeral's distribution the needed nudge. "Our engineer Howard (Bilerman, co-owner of Hotel2Tango), used to record bands when they came through town -- you know, from the audience with a hand-held recorder -- and he taped a Superchunk show in Montreal and sent a copy to Mac (Superchunk leader and Merge co-founder Mac MacCoughan). They became friends and would trade CDs from time to time. Howard would send him some local stuff he liked but I don't think anything came of it before. He sent Mac some rough mixes of our album and since it came from someone he knew he actually listened to it, and he liked it. We were talking to other labels, but it was really appealing that Merge didn't know anything about the band, there was no hype involved, they just heard the actual recordings they'd be putting out and felt they were strong enough to go with it."

Despite an emotional grandeur running through its work, the Arcade Fire shows a fearless willingness to dive headlong into numerous styles, perhaps most noticeably when the track "Wake Up" abruptly detours into a Motown vamp. "Regine had a chord progression and melody for that one that we played with a lot," Butler explains. "It could easily have sounded like a Chinese orchestra-type song, and I really wanted to try it with a Motown beat but when we did the whole song that way it didn't work. So finally Will and Tim (bassist Kingsbury) came up with a rhythmic thing that became the basis for the song, but occasionally we'd break into something different toward the end and the Motown one happened to be the version that made the record."

Chassagne and Butler collaborate on most of the material before fleshing it out with the full band. In what seems an increasing trend particularly among Canadians (Sloan, Broken Social Scene) the Arcade Fire's members are prone to swapping instruments onstage. "It might be simpler for one person to learn all the bass lines, for instance, but it feels better to play what we were playing when the song took shape. So we burden the audience a bit with the switchovers -- maybe it'll get a little easier once we can get rid of some of our pawn shop gear." Also like Broken Social Scene, the band expands at times to accommodate its ambitions and environment -- second violinist Owen Pallett is being added for the upcoming leg of the tour, temporarily swelling their ranks to eight until Will peels off to return to school in Chicago. "Before our CD release party in Montreal we had people asking, 'Are you guys going to bring a choir?' But we didn't get too ambitious -- we had just added a new drummer so we had our hands full simply getting through the songs." Chassagne drummed on about half of Funeral, and still does so live. Engineer Bilerman did the honors on the rest of the disc, but bowed out once the live schedule intensified.

The sudden regimented nature of touring caught Butler somewhat off guard. "I booked the band myself for a long time and I sometimes thought I'd be really together and try to set things up a month in advance only to be told the clubs were already full. I'd think, 'What the hell? How can I possibly plan any further ahead?' And now we've got things plotted a year into the future -- it's insane. We've sublet our place in Montreal so we have nowhere to go back to until summer, anyway. Situations like New York are getting ridiculous -- our first show this time sold out in 45 minutes so we added a second at a bigger venue and we probably could have sold twice as many tickets for that too. It's like, where are we supposed to play? Some of these places are already bordering on too big." It sounds a bit like the fire code-necessitated NYC residency of the Clash at Bond's two decades earlier, but Butler bristles at any such comparison. "Oh, we're not to that point," he demures.

"We're self-managed and it's a big push initially just to figure out how this all works. Mac and Laura (Merge co-founder Laura Ballance) are a great resource because they did with Superchunk almost exactly what we're trying to do. And some of the guys in Godspeed have been incredibly helpful with advice on how to approach certain things. It's not really political for us but we want to learn, so that if eventually we have a bit of a bigger infrastructure we at least know what's going on and it's not 'When do I wake up today, boss?'"

For those hankering for more Arcade Fire material, your best bet is the homemade debut available at the merch table at Arcade Fire shows. "I still stand behind the songs on it, although the recording quality's not very good and the singing's pretty crappy," Butler qualifies. "There's a track on it called 'No Cars Go' that I'd really like to revisit, I think it's one of the best songs we've written." As for Funeral's follow-up, some patience may be required. "It's kind of difficult writing on the road -- we're doing it here and there but before our entire lives were writing. We didn't have any distractions, we'd just wake up in the middle of the afternoon, get a coffee and start writing. We'll probably have to schedule to get that luxury again -- maybe in the summer of 2006," Butler laughs.