The biggest little band in indie-dom, Arcade Fire went from unknown to ubiquitous shortly after releasing its first album, Funeral, in 2004. From small clubs to huge festivals, the Canadian band—led by American expatriate Win Butler and his wife, Regine Chassagne—delivered exhilarating, breathless performances. In 2006, they retreated from the spotlight—which included opening for U2, befriending David Bowie, and stealing Lollapalooza—to devise Funeral's follow-up. Recorded in a Canadian church that the band bought and rehabbed, Neon Bible takes a dark turn into the worlds of religion and pop culture, which clearly wasn't the simplest route for a band potentially on the edge of superstardom. Though more challenging than its predecessor, the album pays off brilliantly, with incisive words and triumphant melodies. The day Neon Bible was released, Win Butler—on the phone from Dublin—spoke to The A.V. Club about the band, its new album, fame… oh, and "evil and death and love."
The A.V. Club: Do you feel like you've been under a microscope these past two months?
Win Butler: Aside from being sick the past couple of months, it's been a little less chaotic than last time. Last time, we didn't really know what was happening; we just had a cell phone in the van and it was ringing and ringing. This time, we knew what we were getting into.
AVC: Why did you smash your guitar on Saturday Night Live?
WB: It was kind of in the moment, but it kind of fit with the song ["Intervention"], too. About halfway through the song, my string broke, and I was cutting my finger. At one show in London, a couple of strings broke, and the last half of the song, I was kind of miming playing the guitar. I thought it was a cool image with the song, like an emperor's-new-clothes thing—this obviously destroyed guitar and me still strumming along. I hated that guitar, to be honest. It was time for that guitar to leave this world, and what better way to go?
AVC: Have you considered the possibility that Neon Bible might be a number-one or at least a top-five record?
WB: It definitely doesn't consume my thoughts, but that possibility had occurred to me. It's pretty wild. It's pretty amazing for a band like us to be in that position. It's funny in kind of a satisfying way.
AVC: The pre-release publicity stuff—the toll-free number touting the album, the viral-video infomercial—seemed in that spirit, not too serious.
WB: We spent so long on the record, and it's all so meticulous—it's good to be able to do stuff that's really half-assed and off-the-cuff, from a creative standpoint. When we did that YouTube video, we had a rehearsal at my house, and we were going to release the track list, and I had Jeremy [Gara, drummer] do a little montage of some of the songs, and when we heard it, it sounded like one of those Greatest Hits Of The '70s compilations, so we thought we should make a fake Hits Of The '70s thing for it. I had a new laptop with the camera built in, so we learned how to use iMovie on the fly. It's fun to do something that half-assed and send it out into the world and have 50,000 people see it.
AVC: Your music is often dark, especially on the new album, but is that sense of humor in there somewhere, too?
WB: That's part of the visual side, an opportunity to bring in different ideas. Brazil is my favorite movie of all time; I really relate to stuff that's funny but also pretty serious. Funny songs aren't usually that good. [Laughs.] Like Weird Al and maybe a couple of Beatles songs, but it's kind of hard to bring humor into rock music in an interesting way.
AVC: How long did it take you to fix up the church you bought and recorded in?
WB: The whole process was really long. We bought it in October or November [of 2005] and did a couple of demos in December, but it was really bare-bones. Then over about a six-month period, while we were starting to record, we were building bedrooms in the basement and getting new equipment. By three-quarters through the record, it was pretty set up.
AVC: Presumably you had more time, money, and experience this time around. What were you able to do in the studio that you couldn't before?
WB: Even though we hadn't played live for a year or so, we were way better at playing together than we were before. There are certain songs on the record, like "Antichrist Television Blues," where everything was recorded live off the floor, which wouldn't really have been possible to do on the last record. We did a bunch of location recording, like the pipe organ. We went into this other little church and recorded "My Body Is A Cage" and "Intervention," and the beds of those were live. Our goal was to take the core of a weird little live thing and do whatever we wanted with it afterward. The last record, we were playing live a lot while we were recording, so I feel like the arrangements had a lot of time to develop, and we wanted to be able to do that with this record, so we'd work for two weeks, then take two weeks off and just go home and play and think about it, kind of allow the songs to evolve.
AVC: Are you a religious person? You studied religion, right?
WB: I studied scriptural interpretation, which is more about how people get meaning out of texts, looking at stuff in the Old Testament—Muslims, Christians, Jews, different interpretations of the same texts…
AVC: Did that inform the lyrics?
WB: A bit. I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible. The thing that's always been interesting to me about religion is that compared to the more modern spirituality, the West Coast pseudo-Buddhist thing that people go for these days, actual Buddhism and Islam have been looking at these philosophical questions, at really hard questions, for a long time. There's a lot of stuff that philosophy doesn't talk about, and in the secular world, a lot of times, people don't talk about these ideas, and that was always really interesting for me.
AVC: What things in particular?
WB: The idea of evil and death and love. There's not really any scientific way to talk about it. Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically… I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.
AVC: So are your songs more about searching, or more about offering those tools to people? Or neither?
WB: I think hope only means anything if it's in something real; otherwise, it's just kind of a dream. A lot of stuff is dark in a way, but unless you're really looking at a situation for what it actually is, it's hard to be hopeful—or meaningless to be hopeful about it unless it's actually based in a real possibility. I just saw this thing on Martin Luther King, and before he gave the "I have a dream" speech, he gave a lot of speeches that were about a more negative dream—that you had to face your broken dreams. He spoke about that a lot, the broken American Dream, seeing it for what it really is, the positive and negative. Sometimes religious thinkers can take that on in a different way.
AVC: You modernize it a little, though, don't you? Is it true that "Antichrist Television Blues" was originally called "Joe Simpson"?
WB: No comment. [Laughs.]
AVC: The lyric actually seems somewhat sympathetic to that type of horrible stage-dad figure, whoever he may be.
WB: It's sympathetic to the extent that it's thinking about something that maybe doesn't merit a lot of thought. I find that that aspect of the American dream—the American Idol world—actually takes up a huge part of American culture right now. I feel like a lot of people really relate to that way of thinking, so I thought it was worth thinking about for a minute.
AVC: It's insanely pervasive, even in the "respectable" media.
WB: There's this idea, particularly in pop music and a lot of these pop father/manager types, that you're selling the person instead of the song. You basically want to create something that the fans relate to because it's exactly like them. So there's a lot of art that's made to be in the image of the audience, but then the audience is imitating this version of themselves. It's a really weird cultural feedback loop, and it's kind of strange to watch. It's a new thing since I was a kid, really a different thing.
AVC: Where do you think it's leading?
WB: The whole Ultimate Fighting, WWE reality side of things—I totally get why people are into it. I find myself sucked into it; it's not going away. There's something about human nature that really sucks you in. It's the same thing with celebrity-gossip shows—there's something really powerful about it for people. I think it'll go as far as the law will let it go. I don't think there's any limit. The culture's definitely moving into that violent-porn direction. The most conservative countries always have the weirdest shit going on.
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