Will Butler's American music

Tom Zonderman
© Agenda Magazine
09/04/2015
“After I’ve done Arcade Fire stuff, I’m normally too exhausted to do anything except lie on the couch for a whole year.” Not this time. Will Butler wrote the soundtrack to Her, and he has just unleashed his solo debut.

"Policy is American music in the tradition of Violent Femmes, the Breeders, the Modern Lovers, Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, the Magnetic Fields, Ghostface Killah. And John Lennon (I know, but it still counts). Music where the holy fool runs afoul of the casual world.” These are not the words of Will Butler, but of the American blues pianist Memphis Slim, who thought the Arcade Fire multi-instrumentalist’s solo debut was so good that he wrote an enthusiastic introduction note on the website of Butler’s label – from the grave! “That was a joke, of course,” the 32-year-old musician tells us from New York. A sardonic laugh resounds on the other end of the phone line. “I doubt that he would really recommend my album.” [Chuckles]

Nevertheless, the emphasis on “American music”, a reference to the song of the same name by Violent Femmes, doesn’t seem to be a joke. Butler was born in Northern California and grew up in The Woodlands, Texas, he went on to study Slavic languages, literature and poetry (yes, William Butler Yeats is one of his favourite poets) at Northwestern University in Chicago, and eventually followed his older brother Win to Montreal, Canada, to form Arcade Fire, ten years ago. Arcade Fire is considered a Canadian band, but it’s not that easy to remove America from someone, it turns out. “I’m extremely American,” Butler says. “It’s my heritage. My Americaness really is intrinsic to my approach as an artist. But I don’t think it limits music when you give it a nationality. Look at Dostoyevsky: he was super concerned with the Russian soul, with Russian politics, religion, and culture. But it still translates to my world, even two hundred years later. To call him a Russian Orthodox novelist doesn’t hurt his universality, it just helps us to understand him.”
Butler had been writing songs for quite some time. Why was the time ripe to compile them? “After I’ve done Arcade Fire stuff, I’m normally too exhausted to do anything except lie on the couch for a whole year. [Laughs] But this time, I had a lot of energy.” It is the energy of a young foal, which also clearly resounds in his music. “Yeah. I wanted to make something that felt teenaged while I still had some perspective on that time. I see myself as still relatively young. [Chuckles] The feelings that you have when you’re fifteen or sixteen, the music you listen to, the books you read... Those are really powerful emotions, they stay with you for a long time. Of course it is partly nostalgia, but it’s also trying to tap into something primal.”

Two years ago, together with Canadian multi-instrumentalist Owen Pallett, Butler wrote the soundtrack to Spike Jonze’s film Her. “It was the most collaborative thing I’ve ever done,” says Butler. “You’re working with fictional characters, actors, Arcade Fire, Owen, Spike... I was super happy with the Academy Award nomination [for Best Original Score], but after that I really needed to do something on my own.” [Laughs]

Policy is a very eclectic record. And that is, of course, no coincidence either. “At a certain point I tried to make it sound more similar, but it wasn’t working,” says Butler. “The songs are all over the place; I think that’s the spirit of the times they were written in. These days, everyone listens to everything. People start with Kanye West, switch to Bob Dylan, take in a little Stravinsky, and end with Kraftwerk. That’s the upside to the internet.” Has the internet taught him anything new? “At university I worked at the college radio station. There were stacks of records in the library, they had every weirdo piece of music released from like 1975 to the present, from Steve Reich to Liquid Liquid to ESG to Einstürzende Neubauten. The internet existed, but that was my treasure trove. It was the root of my eclecticism.”
Will Butler has an intellectual side, but he can also be as mad as a hatter. In the early years of Arcade Fire, the Butler boys wore motorbike helmets so that they could drum on each other’s heads and crash into things. [Laughs] “Yeah, we would tear down the plaster in a lot of venues.” During Arcade Fire concerts, he still bounders across the stage like a bat with rabies. In an interview with The Guardian, Butler described Policy consequently as “100% serious and 100% joking”. His lyrics treat themes such as God, money, and the Apocalypse, but he delivers them with a wink and a smile. “We used to watch a lot of The Simpsons as kids – a pop show that had a lot of deep literary references and sarcasm,” his brother Win told the British music magazine NME. “The Simpsons changed a lot of people’s vocabulary,” Will Butler agrees. He goes on to refer to Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, and Herman Melville. “Charlie Chaplin helped to create a new art form, the 20th century, America...and it’s just slapstick comedy. [Laughs] Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is very, very romantic, yet it is also deeply absurd. When I read Moby Dick when I was 18, I was expecting something very serious. It is serious, but it’s also full of slapstick and jokes about whale penises. It’s a wild mix of everything. To me, doing something important and doing something silly has never formed any kind of contradiction in my mind.”

Are we allowed to end on a serious note? “Policy” is very close to “politics”, isn’t it? “Very much so. The songs in general aren’t explicitly political. But they come very much from a politically engaged world. While I was making the album, I read more news and listened to more podcasts and political commentary than I listened to music. The album is embedded in the world, and the world is very political.”

Does an American emigrant perceive his fatherland differently? “Yeah. It has made me identify more as an American. As much as I love living in Montreal, I am so explicitly American. After spending time in Canada, I’ve come to appreciate that.” What about the policy of his native country? “Well, there’s a concept called active liberty: the liberty to govern yourself, to create your society. Being free is very important, but doing something with it is also important. It’s exciting to have the privilege to engage as a citizen. However screwed up politics is, and however screwed up the government is.”

WILL BUTLER
14/4, 20.00, Ancienne Belgique, www.abconcerts.be

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