Here is an Interview with them,I was struck when I listened to them today, that the singer sounds like conor from Bright eyes, both seem to share this way of being totally consumed by the music, which is what makes people connect with them I think, so many bands just look like they are there to get in the NME,and skive college.
Arcade Fire: what's got 14 legs, makes raptous noises, and has an ever-growing following? Ryan Adams gets this scoop
Interview, August, 2007 by Ryan Adams
With their anthemic sophomore album, Neon Bible (Merge), Arcade Fire have cemented their status as one of rock's most adventurous acts. The album--which was recorded in a church in the group's adopted hometown of Montreal and features a pipe organ, a hurdy-gurdy, and a full-blown orchestra among other accoutrements--is a work of singular beauty. With its soaring melodies and churning rhythms, it manages to evoke both the reach-for-the-heavens grandeur of classic-rock acts like U2 and Bruce Springsteen and the all-bets-are-off experimentalism of Sonic Youth and David Bowie. Here, the band's front man, Win Butler, and drummer, Jeremy Gara, talk to friend and fan Ryan Adams.
RYAN ADAMS: My first question for you guys is about your record label, Merge, which is run by Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance of the band Superchunk. Did you guys find them, or did they find you?
WIN BUTLER: Our first EP [Arcade Fire, 2003] we did totally on our own. And then once we started recording our first record, Funeral [2005]--it was kind of our first time in a proper studio.
RA: Was that in Montreal?
WB: In Montreal, yeah. The engineer, Howard Bilerman, who ended up drumming on a lot of the first record and who is in the band, was a big fan of Superchunk. Mac and Laura would stay with him when they were in Montreal because he had been to all their early shows and would tape their performances and stuff. So he would send them things from time to time, and he wound up sending them some rough mixes of early versions of "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" and "Wake Up" [off Funeral]. I think Mac played the songs for the office down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they live. As we got more songs together from Funeral, we sent them more rough mixes, and then eventually we went down and met everyone.
RA: It's a pretty cool label. I'm from near Chapel Hill, and as soon as I could collect records, I had Merge records--because they were from North Carolina and they were so weird. It actually instigated a really tight scene down there. Over the last few years, there's been a lot of focus on the Montreal music scene. Did you guys feel under the microscope there for a while?
WB: Well, we weren't in Montreal that much when it was all going on, but I heard tell of A&R guys coming to weird shows and stuff. When we first started playing in Montreal, there weren't a lot of people making pop music with choruses and melodies. Most of the bands were playing, like, droning, out-there stuff or weird country music or experimental jazz and electronic music. We felt very isolated.
RA: So once Funeral came out and you started playing larger venues, was there a sense that the shit was hitting the fan? Was there one defining moment when you thought to yourself, Oh, my God. This is all about to change?
JEREMY GARA: There were a couple of moments when things started to feel on the brink of total chaos. We didn't have a manager during a lot of the Funeral period, but at some point we just had to get one, because we needed someone to help us out.
RA: I would imagine that with that many people, just deciding where you're going to eat is probably a pretty intense discussion. WB: There was a lot of driving around in a van looking for the $30 hotel instead of the $35 hotel. [Gara and Adams laugh] What was pretty awesome, though, about those first couple of headlining tours was that we would all pull out these friends who we could stay with. We had some of the most amazing times. I remember in Iowa City some of Richard's family [Richard Reed Parry, a guitarist in the band] worked at this Quaker school. We had a day off there, and we rolled into this Quaker boarding school that was completely empty because everyone was out on summer vacation. We stayed in a dorm, and there was this gymnasium and a library. We just had the whole thing to ourselves. People were always coming up with random places where we could stay. It was kind of exciting. I mean, we definitely wound up in some lousy accommodations, but the experience of actually having people come to the shows and, by the end of the tour, selling out venues--there was real excitement in that.
RA: As a songwriter, I've often wondered how both Funeral and Neon Bible developed thematically. They're very complete pieces of work to me. In fact, they remind me of movies, in a way---especially Neon Bible, which is, in essence, a movie on record.
WB: Well, with both of the records, there was a core of four or five songs that clearly had to be on a record. Then, as the process goes along, and you work on different things, it all kind of starts to make sense and come together. But there's always a spark when you have three, four, or five songs, and you realize that there's definitely a record happening.
RA: For people who haven't seen your live show, there's a huge pipe organ device onstage. It's very intense to see before you even hear it. Is it a real, traveling, honest-to-goodness pipe organ?
WB: When we were recording Neon Bible, we used the biggest pipe organ you've ever seen. The one you hear on the record is in this big Catholic church in Montreal. It's just enormous. There are a lot of Catholic churches in Montreal, and now that people don't go as much anymore, a lot of them have fallen into various stages of disrepair. But we found one that was well maintained. When you really open one of those things up, it's a pretty overwhelming sound. So that was definitely a concern--how the hell were we going to do the songs live? But I found this sample set online; they had sampled two orchestrasize pipe organs in Budapest. It's a 30-second sample of each key, and then when you release it, there's a release sample. So you have the real sound of the room. Then we had a facade made by a pipe organ maker in Montreal. He was pretty into it, as it was a kind of fun project for him--I think he usually restores pipe organs. He just got to take a bunch of his leftover pipes and design a casing for it. So what you see onstage actually folds in half into a road case. RA: Did you guys have It In mind to record Neon Bible outside of a regular recording studio before you made the album, or was making it In the church a happy accident? WB: It was definitely a bit of a happy accident. Once we found the space, it became clear that it would be a great place to make a record.
RA: The acoustics are unreal too.
JG: They were actually a bit nightmarish at first because of all the reverb. You would hit a snare drum, and it wouldn't stop ringing for 10 seconds. But we made some adjustments, I'm sure on paper the acoustics were not the industry-standard ideal, but recording the album there was more about capturing the feeling of being in a room.
RA: I understand that there is a book called The Neon Bible [by John Kennedy Toole, who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces]. Is that something you found after coming up with the concept of the record, or did it actually inspire the concept of the record?
WB: I had that image in my mind before.
RA: Can you tell me about that? Because, without meaning to sound pretentious, the complexity of spirituality is a subject that makes its way Into Neon Bible a lot.
WB: I grew up in the suburbs of Houston, and there are a lot of megachurches there. I've been exposed to that quite a bit--the commercial church. Religion becomes fused with the culture, and it becomes more commercial-people are all selling their versions of something, you know? It becomes about trying to make religion relevant, when our culture is far removed from the culture in which the Bible was written. I think a lot of people read the Bible as this handbook of how to live life, and they'll find that in it no matter what--like, how does this text literally apply to exactly what's going on in my life right now? RA: Whereas the Bible's application may have been more relevant to the time In which it was written, and the Old Testament relevant to its time.
WB: Obviously the Bible is still relevant, or so many people wouldn't still believe in it. I think that's a pretty unique thing about it. But, at the same time, expecting to somehow relate it to the culture in which we live now does something pretty weird to the meaning of the text.
RA: When I first saw you guys perform the songs on Neon Bible, I remember feeling like a tiny dot in some great big picture. It was almost like everybody was there for the tunes. Of course, the audience was all singing along, and the songs invite that sort of participation. But the remarkable thing is that they seem like they don't necessarily have a bottom--they just climb and escalate.
JG: Even in the studio, everyone in the band really just allows the songs to go where they need to go. Nobody is too intensely fixated on their musical egos or making their presence felt--it's all for the good of the song. It's sort of the same with the live show. It's just this unspoken thing where everyone sort of does what is meant to be done at every point, whether or not we know what we're doing. It's still this weird, mysterious thing that happens.
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