Arcade Fire's Reflektor

Arcade Fire’s Reflektor is out next Tuesday, Oct. 29. Perhaps you’ve heard.

This band means a lot to a lot of people; they mean even more to me. They were the last—and in fact, only—band of my professional, pre-parenthood career as a music journalist that I saw rise from humble beginnings to global stardom, and who I got to know as people along the way. (Though for many obvious reasons, I only see some of them once a year now; the others even less.) On that entirely personal level, Arcade Fire’s success is a vindication of every time I’ve tried in vain to pitch an editor or even a friend on the brilliance a band they’ve never heard.

Reflektor is Arcade Fire’s fourth album. Unlike many frothing reviewers, I don’t think it’s their best—in fact, it may well be their worst, for its 80-minute length and the inclusion of some dreadful tracks that are best left alone. Coming off The Suburbs, it’s an inevitable letdown. But when it shines, it soars, containing not only their most truly ambitious tracks, in terms of self-reinvention, but also their trippiest and most wild.

I spoke to Win Butler for a story in this week’s Maclean’s here; the full Q&A is posted here. I reviewed the album for The Grid here. Three years ago when I was hired to work on their press materials, I wrote this piece for my own reasons, and I’m still very proud of it.

Here are my unedited conversations with Richard Reed Parry and Tim Kingsbury for the Maclean’s article.

Richard Reed Parry

October 15, 2013

What are you up to outside of Arcade Fire?

I’m recording a couple of Arthur Russell tracks for a Red Hot tribute project, and working on a Little Scream record that should be done in January.

How many times have you been to Haiti now?

I’ve been down a couple of times. And then we were all in Jamaica for a week together, and then me, Win and Regine were all down in Trinidad for a week as well.

What was going to Trinidad about?

It was more to soak up more carnival stuff and see what people were doing. It was a dream of mine forever, to go and hear the giant steel bands live, which have 80 people in them, steel orchestras, which is the most amazing and insane musical beast there is. They have arrangers who are basically doing mash-ups, taking loads of different, weird, disparate popular music, and they smush them all into one big eight-minute arrangement for a steel pan orchestra. I had a National Geographic record of carnival in Trinidad that had a few fragments of live recordings of steel bands at carnival, and many years ago I played it for Win, so we were stoked to see it live. It had 30-second fragment of a huge beat and the biggest sound ever and then all these people freaking out because it’s carnival. These field recordings make the hair on your neck stand up. So it was a dream of mine to go see that for years.

When did you first acquire that record?

Maybe 15 years ago. I distinctly remember playing it for Win and Regine when we first started playing music together.

They went there on their honeymoon, didn’t they? And came back with a steel pan? Is that the one we hear on the record?

Same one!

Is that the first time it’s appeared on a record?

No, actually I used to play that thing live, pre-Funeral, on a lot of songs.

Really? Why do I not remember that?

I played it at that show we did with the Constantines at the Horseshoe. And it’s on the song “Lenin” that was going to be on Funeral, but ended up on that Dark is the Night compilation later.

Growing up in Toronto, was Caribana ever a big deal for you?

Not really when I was young [he went to high school in Ottawa], though I’ve played in reggae bands, and that’s been a part of my musical curiosity forever.

What do you think is different about Haitian music compared to other Caribbean music?

It has all the kompa influences and the soca thing as well. You kind of have to get into minute musical terminology to start defining specific instances, outside of the rara thing, which is very Haitian. But also you get loads of elements in rara from Ghanaian music, like the horns. So much of that music is interrelated, and various regions will put little accents in or add a different instrument and things progress over time. And Haitian kompa has similarities with Colombian cumbia, but they’re totally different.

And Brazilian, too. Win and I talked extremely briefly about Black Orpheus. Was that a reference point for this record?

It became one at a certain point, but not from the get-go. Win watched it at some point and was inspired by how it was relating to some of the lyrical stuff he was writing, and then he started playing with that a little bit.

There are two song titles that reference it, and there’s a song called "Afterlife" and heaven plays a role in "Here Comes the Night Time."

That was happenstance. There was already a song with those references, and then we thought to do another after we stumbled on it.

You’ve described the media lead-up to Reflektor’s release as “an art project.” Why? How is that different than any other media campaign involving slow leaks and poster campaigns and major television appearances?

We always forgo what would be commercially a guaranteed success, the traditional media things you’re supposed to do in favour of reaching out in our own way, making every gesture personal and have an artistic thrust behind it, or doing something fun, funny, weird or unexplainable instead of doing the boiler-plate promotion that one should do when one is in a position of selling more records to more people. But that’s never been something that has concerned us, and thankfully that has taken care of itself for us. Our natural instinct is to put up some weird posters with our faces cut out and make an alter ego and do a show where people aren’t allowed to bring cellphones—that’s what we want to do. Then it magically turns into promotion. Truly, all that stuff is just saying, “Oh, it would be neat to do chalk advertising with a mysterious symbol that will disappear over time,” rather than paying tons of money for big ugly billboards saying: Arcade Fire album available Oct. 29. Of course, eventually you have to do that because you do want people to buy your record. There’s such an abundance of empty publicity crap in music and in the entertainment business, and I don’t think that side of the business drew any of us into being in a band. As long as we can do things that are culturally interesting or relevant, we’ll always do that rather than twerking on the MTV Awards.

What about the YouTube awards, whatever that may be, that you’re doing in November?

The reason we’re doing that is because our friend Spike [Jonze] is directing it, and maybe we can do something really fun and live; it’s a challenge. That’s the side of it where you think, okay, we’re in a weird, popular position, and we have to figure out how many of those opportunities you want to work and what you want to do with them. Obviously it comes with a lot of attention, but the goal is to do something artistic while they’re paying attention. If we just wanted attention, there’s a whole range of godawful things we could be doing. We’re not going to do a red carpet; we’d rather bring our own.

And now people seek you out; or you can get people like Terry Gilliam on board just with a cold call.

That’s the benefit of being in the position we’re in. We can take a stab at these collaborations with people we want, and it’s worked out a lot of the times.

David Bowie shows up on this record, after only suddenly re-entering the public sphere after eight years out of it. Was he in touch that whole time?

He sends his best wishes when we do things that get on to his radar. He has kept some contact over the years; he’s a genuine fan of the band, which is amazing and nice. He heard through mutual friends that we were mixing in New York and wanted to come by and see what we’re up to. He showed up and was really into the song. He joked that we should hurry up and record it, or he would record it for us. We said, well, maybe you should sing on it. We had already talked about having another voice on it anyway, so it worked out.

That must have been around the same time he surprised the world by suddenly releasing a new album.

It was very shortly after that, yeah.

The generation you came up with in Montreal is now the old guard. There’s a new Spencer Krug album coming out the same day as yours. How tied in do you feel to the next wave of Montreal artists, outside of Little Scream?

I go see the Barr Brothers whenever they play, and I enjoy what Lief Vollebek is doing. I don’t feel super tied in. I’m more insular and continually going back in time and discovering old things I’ve never heard before. In general I find a lot more excitement and curiosity about old music and music from other places rather than what is young and fresh and new. Colin [Stetson] is doing the best, most groundbreaking work as anyone anywhere, and obviously Little Scream is my main musical love—in many ways—but the record [Little Scream] making right now is something I’m really excited about, even outside of being something I’m working on. You also hit a certain point when you travel so much and knowing people in music, that you mostly just keep tabs on people you know and love who are making music, and you’re less hungry for new sounds—which are rarely new sounds. Which is what’s remarkable about Colin, is that he’s actually making new sounds, which I love and will always go see.

What do you want to hear when you go out dancing right now?

Wow. Hmmm. Barry White. I’m on a big Barry White kick right now, and I also found a steel band’s version of a Barry White song that is really incredible. It’s absurd, but it is the most beautiful thing. I love that cultural clash element, and that happens a lot with steel pan stuff; I also just found a version of a Meters song, which is so fun and heavy and unlikely and weird. I love finding cover songs that are way more danceable than the originals, like the Slits’ version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

What is Sarah Neufeld doing? She’s not in press photos and not listed as a member of the band in any promo material, but she did play all the warm-up shows with you.

She’s still involved. We did all the writing and groundwork for this record in Jamaica where it was just the six of us. She’s always involved in the later stages of the record-making process anyway. We did tons of demos in Jamaica and we realized that this was really going to be just the six of us; obviously we’re going to bring her and Owen [Pallett] and Marika [Anthony-Shaw] in when it’s time for strings, but it just worked out that way. It wasn’t an official decision on anyone’s part; it’s just how the schedule fell. She’s still going to come out with us and be her awesome self. She had a lot of her own stuff going on this year, making a beautiful record and opening a yoga studio in New York, so she had her hands full.

Tim Kingsbury

October 15, 2013

I hear you’re travelling with two percussionists. Where are they from?

They both live in Montreal; I’m pretty sure they were both born here. They both spend a fair bit of time in Haiti and they’re well-versed in voodoo beats.

How did you find them?

The guy who owns Club Lambi recommended those guys. For some of the record we used these two guys from this band Ram, from Port-au-Prince. We first met them in Quebec City when we played Festival d’Eté. Then when we went to Haiti, the two shows we played there were opening for them, one at this hotel, the Oloffson; the singer of Ram owns the hotel and they do a weekly gig there, so they invited us to play with them. We played with them one more time at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and after that Win and Regine and Will went to a studio in Lafayette with a couple of the percussionists, and they recorded some stuff that we ended up writing songs around.

Like they laid down the rhythm and then you arranged around it?

They were playing these traditional voodoo beats, and Win and Regine and Will were jamming along to see what came out, and then they’d all work together to come up with what became the beginning of some songs.

I feel like these influences are really only there, however, if you know the story; there’s nothing about this that sounds remotely Haitian or Caribbean to me, outside of a few moments or sounds.

You’re right, it doesn’t resemble traditional music overall, outside of some parts of "Here Comes the Night Time." The influences are not all Haitian.

Win told me that both you guys and James Murphy knew that people would say he made you guys play congas. And yet Funeral had Motown and disco and New Order beats on it—very little of this is alien to Arcade Fire.

To me the biggest difference is that we’re more comfortable in the studio, and we can reproduce more specifically what we’re looking for. Whereas on Funeral, we’d think, “I want it to sound like this”—and then you’d do your best to make it sound like that but it wouldn’t sound anything like that. Now I think we’re still fumbling, but we have more experience.

What really struck me about this record is the sound, the attention to small detail in the production. Is a lot of that coming from Murphy?

A lot of that is us, I think. Everyone is involved: Win certainly has a microscope on stuff. Everyone does, in their own way.

Win was telling me about why he prefers using analog tape, not just for audio reasons but for immediacy reasons, because you don’t have 100 takes to spare.

Definitely. By cutting out options, you save yourself a lot of pain.

Was it all done that way?

No, but most of the beds were done to tape, the meat of the songs. The song "Reflektor" was live with 11 people all playing together on that one, and then just overdubbing a couple of instruments and the vocals later. For me, that was the highlight of making the record.

I know that you had wanted to work with Murphy on Neon Bible and that schedules didn’t work out. What do you think that record would have sounded like with him?

That’s a good question. It might have changed the sonics of it more than the vibe. For this record, he was open to facilitating with whatever we wanted. I think he would have done that there as well. A song like “Reflektor,” you might listen to it and immediately say, “Oh, James Murphy produced that.” Actually, a lot of the ideas were there before James got here. He certainly helped. The stuff he had the most influence on is probably the stuff that sounds the least like LCD, like “Awful Sound,” which he really worked hard on, and that has a very classic rock vibe to it.

I don’t remember harmonies every being a bit part of Arcade Fire, in terms of people harmonizing with Win on the lead vocal.

Me and Will and Richie and Jer, we started a cover band and did a few shows when we were in the final stages of making The Suburbs. We were mixing by then and going stir crazy because we weren’t playing that much. We got together and started slamming out covers with the intention of singing together and work on that. That came in handy for this record. In the past, we’d think about it, but no one was taking on the challenge; now we’re more comfortable singing together.

What was your cover set list?

We did the hits of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. We did a couple of Beatles songs, Rolling Stones, Jonathan Richman, Devo, some early R.E.M., Pixies, some Flying Burrito Brothers. We did one Pop Montreal after-party, and at BAM in Brooklyn once as a closing party for something. We mostly just got together and said, “Hey, let’s play new songs today.”

I feel like there’s more percussion than guitars on this record.

That’s probably true.

What do Haitians know about Arcade Fire?

I don’t think we’re a household name in Haiti (laughs). When we went down as a whole band, it was Partners in Health who hosted us and gave us a tour of hospitals and sites they work at. We played music in some of those places. People there were familiar with the band, because Win and Regine had gone down a couple of times and met people. So there was a big welcome banner for “Arcade and Fire.” We played our older songs and a few covers, because we weren’t sure if people would be into us or not. It was fun, and people were certainly listening. When Ram started playing, however, it turned into the best party I’ve ever been to.

And you’ve been to some parties, Tim Kingsbury.

I have! It was a place in dire need of a really good party, and Ram really brought it. There were a couple of thousand people dancing harder than I’ve ever seen. That would have been a year and two months after the earthquake.

Other than producing the new Basia Bulat album, what’s been keeping you busy?

Mostly Arcade Fire. House renos that seem to take forever. I’m still writing songs.

Your long-simmering solo project?

It’s going to be more of a debut box set. B-Sides and Rarities will be my first album.

Arcade Fire 07: Win & Regine 2

The day before the Arcade Fire's first live show in 14 months, in January of this year, time was precious and an interview time was a luxury. Following up on our conversation the night before, their manager's assistant suggested that I stalk the band while they were fitted for their custom stage earplugs the next morning, squeezing in time with Win and Regine while they waited for their appointment.

Naturally, that didn't work out, but we did break for lunch at a nearby food court, where we walked through the Neon Bible track list to discuss lyrics as well as socio-political concerns, maintaining control of their career, the charities they're working with, encountering celebrity (both their own and others), and how the internet shaped with their quick ascendance. You know, the usual--along with some discussion of comparative religion.

Portions of this appeared in this AOL article.

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Arcade Fire
Win & Regine
January 18, 2007
Locale: eating tikka chicken wraps in the Faubourg Food Court on Ste-Catherine

I thought today we could walk through the record a bit and talk about specific songs. Where did the image of “Black Mirror” come from?

W: I don’t know if I want to go too in depth. It’s an image of how so much of culture is how people want to see themselves in other things. A lot of TV and music is made to reflect how people are so that people relate to it. It was an image of something that’s the opposite of this reflection of yourself, an absence of the self. Wanting to see something that’s entirely not yourself. [long pause]

Is “Keep the Car Running” an older song? It sounds familiar.

W: We did play it after Funeral, though it wasn’t ever really a song.

R: I don’t think we ever played it outside of rehearsal.

Lyrically, this is one of the more oblique songs for me.

W: Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had these recurring dreams of people coming to get me all the time. It’s a familiar emotion from my dreams, and then having that resonate in the real world is a strange feeling.

Were you a paranoid kid?

W: No, not at all, really. I just have these dreams where someone’s coming, I don’t know who it is, and I have to get away.

Do you still have that dream?

W: Yup.

Who’s coming to get you now?

W: I never quite know. It’s always someone who doesn’t have good intentions. There’s a lot of stuff here about names and naming things, but I’m not sure what it is.

We talked about “Neon Bible” last night, and since then it struck me that whenever I think of neon I think of the service industry: a cheap motel, fast food restaurants. The phrase “neon bible” then implies someone treating religion as a commodity, something consumerist.

W: There’s definitely an aspect of religion always combining with culture and becoming a third thing. Where it gets weird is when people mistake the culture for religion, and vice versa. These deeply held beliefs that are partially cultural artifacts. The idea that every line in the Bible is supposed to apply to some real thing in your life and you have to find some way to make it all apply.

As much of it is story as it is parable.

W: For me, it’s hard to relate to so many different stories. There’s a lot to chew on in the Bible, and [it’s impossible] to think of it as one coherent whole that’s telling you one specific thing, like it’s some kind of manual on how to live. I don’t see how you can read that and get that out of it. There is some advice in there, but that’s not the overall sense I get. It’s way more varied than that.

You studied interpretive religious texts in school, didn’t you?

W: Yep.

I’m thinking of how integral it is in Jewish culture to debate the Torah all the time, that’s what Talmudic scholars do every day. Nothing’s set in stone, it’s all up for debate. Whereas for so much of fundamentalist Christianity, the Bible is untouchable.

W: Even in the different Jewish denominations, the spirit of the Talmudic texts was about interpretations, and then it becomes: ‘These are the interpretations.’ Know what I mean? Then the weird interpretations all get set in stone and that’s what it is.

That’s like people who transcribe John Coltrane solos. Let’s talk about “Intervention.” This is one of the many songs here talking about fear.

W: I thought a lot about how in the Bible it talks about the fear of God as an idea, and what that means exactly. “Black Wave” is similar to this. There are certain kinds of fear that make you want to change, and kinds of fear that make you want to stay the same and protect yourself.

For me, the fear of God is the type of fear where you’re in the middle of the ocean and there’s a giant black wave underneath you, it’s something you can’t see and it’s natural to have a certain amount of fear that’s about your relationship to a world that you don’t understand and trying to find your place in it.

Then there’s the kind of fear that makes you into a fortress, saying, “I am right.” Your fear then is some sort of protective thing. It can be used as a justification, or a way to not change. In the same way, many people read the Bible and take from it exactly what they want to believe. I think everyone’s like that. They want to take from the world where they already are. ‘Oh, the world supports the way I already am. That’s convenient.’

That brings us back to “Black Mirror.” When I think of so much media in the States, you have Fox News catering to one side, and Air America caters—or catered, I suppose—to the other. Have you ever looked at the satellite radio channels? One provider explicitly bills two of their channels as “all-talk right wing radio” and “all-talk left wing radio.”

W: I really think that’s the way stuff is headed. People want to be able to choose things that reflect exactly the way they are. To me, that’s where the culture starts to get weird.

R: You don’t need to think anymore.

W: It’s like a fake diversity, where people don’t have to come into contact with anything that’s fundamentally different from the way they think. It’s almost like you’re shocked when people feel differently about something. You’re outraged that someone can have fundamental beliefs that are different than yours. It’s sad. People talk so much about, ‘Oh, we all have so much in common. Why can’t we all get along?’ Well, if we had so much in common, then we WOULD get along. Not everything is the same. People do believe different things. Islam and Christianity are different. That’s why they’re in conflict so much. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

On the right wing, it’s all about “it’s different, so it’s evil.” And the left wing is all about “it’s all the same thing.” I think they’re both bullshit. No, shit’s fucking different, that’s why people are killing each other over this shit, because it’s actually different. It’s a superficial idea of understanding that doesn’t have anything to do with real life. If your parents get killed in a bombing, it takes a lot more than “Come on, we all share the same ideas” for people to actually forgive each other, for there actually to be understanding. The idea of forgiving someone who’s done something evil to you is a really terrifying idea. That’s why both sides ring hollow to me.

We’ll talk about forgiveness a bit more in a second. Were “Black Wave” and “Bad Vibrations” always meant to be one song, or two separate ones?

R: They were always together.

W: The first part is an escapist pop song, and the second part is “Woah, it’s coming for you!”

R: The first half is: “I can run away and it will be fine. You can make it if you try!”

W: There’s this Bruce Springsteen thing on Funeral that’s kind of like, [sings] “We’re gonna run away and we’re gonna make it, baby!” This time, it’s like, “You can run, but you can’t hide. It’s still gonna be there.” [laughs]

Keep the car running, because they’re coming for you. What about the line “eating in the ghetto on a hundred dollar plate”—where did that come from?

W: The Brazil thing we were talking about last night.

R: They both relate to Brazil.

W: Not directly, but the feeling.

“Ocean of Noise”? [long pause]

W: I’m really proud of that one. It was hard for us to play that soft and slow and to get the feel of it. I’m really happy with how it turned out. Lyrically, it’s a feeling I wanted to get off my chest.

[long pause] “The Well and the Lighthouse” is based on a fable by Fontaine, called “The Fox and the Wolf.” The basic plot is a fox who is really hungry and sees a piece of cheese at the bottom of a well, so he lowers himself down to get it. But it’s just a reflection of the moon. He thinks he’s going to die down there, but he hears a wolf coming. So he calls out, ‘Hey, Mr. Wolf, there’s this delicious cheese down here, do you want to come and get it?’ As the wolf is lowering himself down, he lets the fox get up. Basically, you always fall for what you desire. Fontaine always tells a story and then has a moral at the end, which is: don’t laugh at the wolf, because everyone is willing to believe what they desire or what they fear. Those two things make people blind. [Vocally in the duet,] Regine is the fox and I’m the wolf.

What is the image of the lighthouse, and how does that tie in?

R: If you draw a well, and you draw a lighthouse, they’re the complete opposite in every possible aspect. Darkness, light, everything.

The next song here [“Antichrist Television Blues”] is the epic.

W: My ribs hurt after singing this song. This song is the same idea we were talking about before. The creepiest lyric here encapsulates the whole thing: “wanna hold a mirror up to the world so they can see themselves inside my little girl.” It’s this idea of trying to make cultural art that reflects exactly the way people are, but it expresses the pornography of that idea at the same time. There are always these 45-year old men behind the whole thing, writing the lyrics and everything. It’s a sexual fantasy which is a normal part of the culture. That’s fine, I’m not a prude about it. It’s just depressing to hear girls talking as if they’re making their own choices when it’s so obvious that they’re not, when they’re slaves in a certain sense. The idea that they’re selling is not helping any girls out, that’s for sure.

You’ve talked about culture only reflecting what people are, which is fine to some degree, but personally I’ve always wanted culture to also be something that we aspire to, something that is more than what we are. The second you stand up and try and do something different or grandiose, the worst slur someone can throw at you is that you’re pretentious, and that’s somehow a negative thing. As opposed to supposedly acting like people in the street, who in fact are merely imitating those that purport to be reflecting people in the street. It’s a strange circle.

W: It’s cliché, but we really do live in a time that is very different from when we were kids, in terms of the amount of information that people distill. There’s even a generational gap between [younger brother] Will [Butler] and kids who are five years younger than him. This google generation or whatever, seeing the direct impact on the way people process information, it’s amazing.

Better? Worse? Both?

W: I don’t know. I think about my grandpa, who died when he was 96. Which means he was born in 1908, and was in New York when they were building the Empire State Building. He then drove out to California with plagues going across the desert and there was no highway. I’m acutely aware of living through a somewhat similar thing when I’ll tell someone, “Yeah, we were around before the internet.” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?!”

We were talking last night about how people might respond to “Windowsill.” Have you given it any more thought?

W: I feel like this is a weird generation, where people think, “Oh, no, not another thing about war. Oh, c’mon.” I’m sure there will be a bit of: “Oh, c’mon already, haven’t we already talked about this?”

But we haven’t really. All things considered, there really hasn’t been that much music that addresses the past five years.

W: I feel the same way a bit when the Neil Young thing comes out, and it’s like, c’mon.

I felt like saying, “Thanks for finally showing up, Grandpa!”

W: All you can do is say what you feel inspired to say.

Is a song like this hard to write, considering how loaded it could be?

W: It was pretty to easy to write. It kind of wrote itself. It says exactly what I wanted it to say, so it doesn’t feel like a put-on. Take it or leave it. I feel like it’s talking about something in a way that isn’t just criticism. It’s not the same as Green Day’s “American Idiot” thing. Maybe it is, but it doesn’t feel that way.

Who was responsible for the commercial? [posted on YouTube in January]

W: All of us, basically. It’s Will’s voice, my body and Richard [Reed Parry]’s face. Richard did the editing. He had never used iMovie before; he learned that night.

R: I held the curtain. It was really spontaneous.

W: We used the built-in camera on the laptop, and a pair of headphones for the audio.

R: We had Jeremy [Gara] make a little soundtrack of samples from the album.

W: We knew we were going to put that up with the tracklisting. Then we realised it reminded us of those TV commercials for greatest hits records.

R: Then we realised, “Hey, doesn’t this laptop have a camera on it?”

When did you realise that Arcade Fire was becoming shorthand for a genre or a type of band?

W: I haven’t noticed that.

R: No.

W: What kind of band is that? Kind of theatrical?

Not really. Usually lots of group singing, usually a large band.

W: Uh-huh.

Of varying quality. Sometimes it’s just a cheap descriptor, other times I can see a similarity but the band has their own interesting things going on. Other times it sounds like a bunch of macho guys who heard Funeral and decided to reinterpret it their own way.

W: Thankfully I’ve been shielded from anything that’s been influenced by us.

When you went on the road, you didn’t have a manager, and that first six months was very whirlwind. Were you holding out for something?

W: We didn’t really want a manager, because we felt they usually did more harm than good. But Scott [Rodger] and ourselves were kind of looking for each other, it turns out. We were curious who managed Bjork, because she seems to have done what she wants, whether it be stupid or not, and has managed to stay around and never really do the radio thing and still be able to do it. And he had heard our record and was coming to our show anyway. He came to France for a show, and ended up coming on the bus and sleeping on the bus. We just really hit it off.

R: Right away. Even without either of us working together, he was already starting to help us. It happened really naturally.

W: He’s really motivated by artistic stuff. It couldn’t work any other way.

I know you’ve always had very high standards about what you do, and not wanting to do things the same way other rock bands do them. In doing that, and in being quite stubborn about a lot of that, you’ve also attracted a lot of people to you that don’t want to play the regular game. Do you get accused of being difficult for putting your foot down? Because you were very self-contained for so long, too.

W: Probably we do, but I don’t hear about it. The thing that’s frustrating for us that probably comes across weird is in Montreal how we’ve always played smaller shows that people can’t actually get into. It’s not a hype thing. We just haven’t wanted to play bigger places as long as we can play a week’s worth of shows or whatever. Part of me feels bad because I really want people to be able to see us, and this summer we’ll probably do some big outdoor shows. But the idea of going into these shitty big clubs, it wouldn’t be worth doing. It’s a trade-off.

It’s a lot more work to find these smaller venues, however. My impression of the dates you’re doing in February is that they’re not traditional venues, many of them, or certainly not used to rock shows.

W: Everything is ten times the work for, like, half the return.

R: Everything! It would be so easy to say, “OK, jewel case, here’s the template, go for it.” But no, we have to use this colour and this and that.

W: I really wish we could let go of it more sometimes. But whatever. Vincent and Tracy are so great, and are even more detail-obsessive than we are. It’s a crazy combo. But it’s good, because you have to live with this shit for the rest of your life, so you might as well do it the best you fucking can. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s just landfill.

You had a lot of high profile endorsements from people I know you respected. Did they pass on any advice you took to heart?

W: It’s cool to see where people are later in their careers, and how they’ve done it. Not necessarily as a model. Very often you meet rock dudes who make rock music and they’re mentally retarded. So meeting people who have real lives and who are interesting…

R: And they’re connected to the world.

W: They’re not in la-la land. It’s good to see.

I know you were offered opening slots for everyone under the sun. Is U2 the only one you took?

W: Those were the only bigger shows we did.

R: Those were just in Montreal and Ottawa.

Why did you say yes to them, and not anyone else?

W: We thought it would be fun to play a couple of big hometown shows at the end.

R: We hadn’t played in Montreal that much, and we were about to stop. They were coming here, so it wasn’t like we had to leave to go somewhere else.

So you told them they had to come to you!

W: It was a fun opportunity. As weird as it is to play those big places, more people saw us that night than have ever seen play in Montreal, period. It was cool that people weren’t expecting to see us. It was a warm feeling, not a typical shitty opening slot where no one’s paying attention. Their stage set-up is pretty interesting: it’s very low, with no barriers.

R: Very close to the people.

W: Really well-designed. Not that I would want to do those kind of venues all the time, but it’s fun to do once in a while.

How would you describe your connection to Montreal audiences, seeing as how you haven’t played here much in the last three years? I’ve heard ridiculous scalper stories about the February shows. What do you want to do when you play your hometown?

W: It’s great to play at home. We had a period where one time would be great, one time would be weird. But the shows at the Corona were some of our best shows we’ve ever played, a really warm feeling. It didn’t feel like this petty Montreal thing. I love this city so much. I think it has so much to offer. It’s important for us to do stuff here, and we’re still trying to figure out how to do that.

How is your level of fame on the streets of Montreal?

R: It’s good. It’s perfect. I love it! Nobody recognizes us.

So much of what made this band successful was word of mouth and the live show, even before everyone started talking about it on the internet once the album came out. But since then, the internet has been both a boon and a bane to your career: on the one hand, it spread word even faster, on the other hand, it’s out of control when it comes to speculation and leaked tracks, etc.

W: It’s kind of a bummer to not be able to play more live without it being a big thing. There was a point when I was writing in my online journal quite a bit, until I realised that I was basically just writing for Pitchfork and NME. I might as well be doing that directly. There was a good six months that was frustrating, because it was coming across like I was trying to build up some hype for the album. I’d say, ‘We did this.’ And within minutes, those sites would be like, ‘They did this!’ Not that I’m perusing the internet all the time—I try not to think about it at all—but it bounces back at you.

I think our approach is definitely centered around the live show. I’m just excited to get these songs sounding good enough to play in front of people. I think that’s our strongest point. The rest takes care of itself. You can get away with being a shitty live band and still have people buy your records, but it’s much more inspiring to me to make the live thing really good and not to think about the radio too much.

“Intervention” was put up on iTunes with all proceeds going to Partners in Health. Why did you choose them?

W: The stuff we’re doing with them is really exciting. We’re going to do this thing where a dollar or a euro off of every concert ticket we sell this year will go directly to Partners in Health—the promoter can’t touch it, we can’t touch it, no one. I read this book by Paul Farmer, the guy who started this charity in Haiti, and felt really challenged by it. Here’s someone who’s devoted his life to this approach of giving people medicine and housing and food and how those are all inter-related. It’s all related to health. Having food and basic shelter is as important as anti-viral medication. Through Regine’s family, I feel really drawn to Haiti. From what I’ve seen, it seems the work he’s doing is really amazing. For me, the potential for raising money for them is the most exciting thing about this whole process. Because I know that we’ll see the work he does.

R: That’s the only thing that excites me about a lot of people knowing what we do, which is the possibility to do things like this.

Did you know Partners in Health before? Was your family involved in anything down there?

R: No.

W: Your dad saw Paul Farmer speak.

R: Yeah, but that’s it.

Are you going to go there at any point?

W: Definitely.

R: We have to. I want to. I’ve never been.

You’ve also done stuff for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti [all proceeds from the six shows in April 2005 in Montreal and Toronto] , Katrina relief [the Fashion Cares iTunes EP with David Bowie] and the Project Red campaign [licensing “Rebellion” for use in the commercial]. Are there others?

W: We’re going to do some Montreal stuff. The secret show on Saturday is for Mission Mile End.

R: I want to do stuff with Dans La Rue, but we haven’t organized it yet.

-end-

Arcade Fire 07: Win & Regine 1

To get to the church of the Arcade Fire, one must drive out of one of North America’s oldest cities, one where an illuminated crucifix stands watch over its citizens. I traversed the snowy countryside on a crisp January day, in the middle of the first week of a much-belated winter. While listening to apocalyptic headlines on the radio, a -20 degree wind howled outside. To my left, I passed a parade of men with guns and ghostly white ski masks, training for a desert operation on the other side of the world. It’s hard to conceive of more appropriate images to serve as an introduction to Neon Bible.

Arriving at their church, it instantly felt like a sanctuary, an ideal place to shack up and keep the world at bay. Which is exactly what the Arcade Fire did for all of 2006, as they converted the church into a studio while writing and recording Neon Bible, trying their hardest to ignore what the rest of the world was expecting from them.

I’d been parsing the text of my Neon Bible intensely before making the trek to Montreal, having received a highly-guarded watermarked copy of it mere days before leaving. I was there to conduct extensive interviews with the band, whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing personally since I moved to Montreal in 2003. I left town in March 2006, but by that time the Arcade Fire were no longer people I’d see regularly in the neighbourhood. Instead, myself and our mutual friends would share stories of their success and laugh, each new story seeming more incredulous than the last.

Along with Ms. cleverLazy, I was also invited out to the church back in November, while they were mixing “(Antichrist Television Blues),” but the mood then was considerably less frantic than it was at this juncture. Now, they were rehearsing for their first live shows in 14 months: one at an Ottawa high school, the other in a church basement in Montreal. After a year of seclusion, it was readily apparent that the coming circus was here and now: managers, tour managers, auxiliary musicians, tech crew and others were arriving from all points of the world.

Characteristically, the Arcade Fire were in a bit of a disarray during my visit, juggling rehearsals with last-minute album artwork adjustments and getting fitted for custom on-stage earplugs. I was supposed to interview them before rehearsal, but that kept getting pushed back until Win Butler admitted that the best time to do this would be during the one hour of his day that his mind was clear: during the one-hour commute from the church back to Montreal.

And so Jeremy Gara drove my car back to the city, while I piled in with Win, Regine, and their old friend Chantal Vaillancourt—who they had hired to be their personal assistant this month—behind the wheel. Regine and I sat in the backseat, while Win hunched over from the front to speak into the microphone. To my knowledge, this was the first interview they’d done for the album, and it was full of long pauses as Win, always careful with his words, thought hard about what he wanted to say on the record.

We only covered half the material I had wanted to, so we met again the next day over lunch. This is part one of the interview, dealing mainly with musical matters; part two, where we get into lyrics, will run tomorrow; part three will feature Tim Kingsbury, Richard Reed Parry and Jeremy Gara.

The Arcade Fire have a rare day off today after their hometown shows in Montreal on the weekend. They play Toronto’s Massey Hall on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Portions of this interview were used in this piece for AOL.

[For a more detailed description of the church, see Sean "Said the Gramophone" Michaels' excellent piece in Paste here.]

---

Arcade Fire
Win & Regine
January 17, 2007
Locale: driving back to Montreal from the church

Right after Funeral came out, you disappeared to Maine for a while to chop some wood and write some songs. Do any of these songs date back that far, or were most of them written in one period of time?

Both: “Intervention.”

W: Jeremy started playing with us two days before the last CD release. After we got through that, we went to my parents’ place in Maine and worked on some songs. One of them was “Intervention.” It was never quite finished; it was more of a sketch of a song. We played it live a couple of times. We worked on what became “Cold Wind,” too, but it was pretty different. That’s the song we did for Six Feet Under.

Before Funeral and in the early stages of the band that you wrote like crazy and had a stockpile of songs. Does anything stretch back to that period?

W: It’s pretty much all new. Of the stuff that actually on the record. We worked on a few older things. “No Cars Go” is probably the oldest thing; it’s on the EP. Pretty much everything else was new, written after we started Funeral.

Did you want to do “No Cars Go” because the first version was so tumultuous and tenuous? I know you were talking about dropping it from the EP at one point, because you were unhappy with the recording.

W: That EP was always a demo. I’m happy with the way it turned out. It’s pretty cool for what we had to work with. The song never sounded that way live at all. We played that song for so many years afterwards in our live show that it became a different thing. Regine had always envisioned an orchestral arrangement that the accordion is hinting at. That was the first thing we recorded for the new record, right after we got off tour, so it was still fresh.

I know that the Funeral material was partially written deliberate to come back with a big attack after the near-breakup of the band, to come back with a bombastic new sound for the new version of the band. Just before it came out, I suspected that newer material might be more acoustic or quieter as a reaction to it, yet what I hear here is even bigger and more bombastic and more over the top than Funeral.

R: Some songs like “Windowsill,” in the beginning was supposed to be a very quiet, bare song, just Win, me, and a guitar. (laughs) I was listening to it in mastering and thought, ‘What happened?’ The ending is so big.

Comparatively, it’s still one of the quietest songs on the record.

R: I think it’s just what we do on default.

W: Not really. You do go into it with a prejudice of how you want it to sound, but “Intervention” was never the way we used to play it. I wanted there to be a pipe organ on that song. The band itself is recorded in a very live, stripped down, just-a-few-mics kind of way. It’s mostly that organ sound that’s really over the top.

R: It hits you in the face, like a big slap!

I don’t feel that way about that song, but “My Body Is a Cage” is so heavy and ends the album on a suspended note. The listener isn’t sure what they’re supposed to do next, they’re left hanging. How did you go about sequencing the album?

W: You start with a couple of anchors: “Black Mirror” was always going to be the first song, and “My Body is a Cage” was always going to be the last song. I don’t know where those decisions come from. We put a lot of thought into sequencing. It can dramatically change the way the songs come across.

Was it important to get a real pipe organ and not just a patch?
R: Real pipe organ, it’s so rare you get to hear it outside of a classical context. It’s such a powerful instrument.

W: It’s really aggressive.

R: It can be.

W: Especially when the stops are all opened up. The first time I heard Regine play it like that, it struck me how biting the sound was, and I’d never heard it used in a different context before.

Had you seen recitals before, or was it played in churches that you went to growing up?

R: My friend was babysitting, or taking care of a church that was about to be sold.

W: The one in Little Italy that’s condos now [on St. Laurent, near St. Zotique].

R: He invited a bunch of people to an art exhibition while he had the place. I went there and played the organ at two in the morning. I pulled out all the stops and started playing, and it was so big and physical. When I stopped, there was 20 or 30 seconds of reverb with all the crazy harmonics. It was so loud, that in the middle I thought I’d started the bells by mistake. ‘Oh no, it’s two in the morning!’ It’s a very special instrument.

It’s literally an awesome instrument: it induces awe, which is apt considering it’s original purpose. I heard the pipe organ in Jean Baptiste myself recently at a concert, and being a lapsed Catholic, it almost made me want to be Catholic again just so I could experience it every week.

W: When they started making those, it was basically the most complicated machine in the world. And it was just to make sound.

R: It’s a mechanical synthesizer, an ancestor of the synth.

That plays into my next question, which is the use of churches. Not just the one you bought and renovated, but your conscious decision to play in them when you can, like your CD launch or some of the venues you’re playing in February. As these structures are being turned into condos—especially in Montreal and Quebec, which went from being the most spiritual society in North America to the most secular in a short period of time—and otherwise being repurposed, it makes you think about what a social and spiritual hub they once were, and how glorious they are architecturally. Whereas now, our social and spiritual hubs are ugly, unwelcoming places. What appeals to you about working and playing in them? Because you’ve obviously made a point of doing so.

R: It is funny that they get turned into condos where no one speaks to their neighbour. Nobody even knows who lives next door!

W: It was mostly about the pipe organ. For the studio, a lot of small churches are designed with acoustics in mind, so that you can speak without a microphone and people can hear you. And having a space where you can spread out and work in is good. Also, we were using a bunch of different organs before we found the right one. The beds for “Intervention” and “My Body is a Cage” were recorded in a church around here that had a small pipe organ, but it wasn’t quite the right sound. Then Richard went to a show at the Jean Baptiste church, and told us that we had to hear that one. And they were pretty open to having non-Christian music play there. I guess because they need the money, because no one goes to church! ‘Whatever, you’re in a Satanic band? Okay, sure, give us $300.’

Witnessing music at a church, it’s so evocative regardless of what your beliefs might be. The original purpose of a church always bleeds into the performance, I find. It still feels like a place of worship.

W: I tend to relate to the kinds of churches where music is really important. Which is pretty much just the black churches in the States. The music in the Catholic church is so lame, and I saw a bit of the evangelical church music in the States—I didn’t grow up in it—but woof, it’s rough. There aren’t too many Bachs out there in the contemporary Christian music world.

One thing that really strikes me about this album is the way it sounds. It’s obviously a bigger-sounding record, but it takes the aethetic of Funeral and makes it sound bigger, without sacrificing the intimacy or turning into a typical big production job. Did you know what kind of sound you were going for?

W: It was important that we weren’t just polishing this rough thing into something smooth. A lot of the time was working for a couple of weeks, then taking a couple of weeks off. We used to play live while we were writing songs, and develop arrangements over time. A song like “The Well and the Lighthouse” was recorded on the day we figured out how to play it. We played it a bunch of times, and got it so that it was exciting to us, and played it the best we could, and that was it. We could have played it tighter, and it could be more rock radio sounding, but that was when we were excited about it so we followed that and got it on tape. We tried to keep the core of a weird little song.

R: You keep the energy, also. You could make everything exactly how theoretically it has to go, but that takes the soul out of it.

That energy does come through in the performance aspect of it, but sonically, it doesn’t come across as squeaky clean.

R: For me, there’s always this balance between two absolutes: the intellectual absolute, where you have to think about this arrangement where it will be this and nothing else, and nothing else will be accepted in my head; and the other absolute, which is completely spontaneous—‘now, I’ve got it, don’t even think about it.’ I try to take the best out of each method.

How long was the process from the time you recorded the first track to the final mix?

W: About a year, from when we started doing demos. There was a while at the beginning where we were setting things up technically at the church. I’d say we started more in February or March, and then did two weeks off, two weeks off, and Tim got married in the summer. We kept whittling away.

I know you had a lot of major label sharks circling around you, and one reason that many people take their bait is that they want a bigger recording budget. But listening to this, it doesn’t sound like you were limited at all: the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, a gospel choir [People’s Church of Montreal], etc. How much more did this cost than Funeral?

(awkward laughs)

W: I don’t really know. A lot of it was investing in the studio. If you take that out… (long pause) I really don’t know. Definitely more. But we paid a lot of people after the fact for Funeral, because we didn’t have any money at the time. You always make the most of what you have. It’s important for us to have genuine freedom to realise stuff we want to do. A lot of the bands that are models for us have been able to do that, do some crazy shit when they want to but not get into that radio world, where you need hits and you’re only thinking of that and spending money on nothing.

Tell me the story of the Budapest orchestra. Were any of you actually there?

R: Yeah! Owen and I wrote the arrangements. It was very intense, because it was in a very short time. I went there with Win and we recorded the songs.

W: I knew that Regine had always wanted to do orchestral stuff, so it was important to me to find a way to make it happen. Arvo Part’s son is a recording engineer, and he helped with the sessions. He’s our age, but he’s been around the classical world his whole life. He knew the studios in Budapest and set up the conductor and helped make it happen. Those were by far the hardest songs to mix. We didn’t want it to sound like Arcade Fire with the Walt Disney orchestra on top. I don’t think you can necessarily tell which songs have the orchestra and which just have our strings on it, because only a couple have the orchestra. It’s just a bit grander than what we can do on our own. For “Black Mirror” and “No Cars” in particular, those songs were conceived with orchestral stuff in mind.

Why Budapest, though?

W: I went to Budapest after high school on a trip through Europe, and I loved it there. The options were Prague or Budapest, and I really wanted to go back to the thermal baths in Budapest. We also did a song called “Surf City Eastern Bloc” that we’re going to save for something else, and we used a military choir from there, just because we wanted someone from Eastern Europe singing it.

Is there something about Eastern European music that appeals to you as well? I know Will [Butler] is a fan.

W: Yeah. I studied Russian literature in university, and I’ve always been interested in Eastern European stuff.

What I like about it in the mix is that a lot of other string sections on rock records sound more like string patches. This sounds very physical.

R: Yeah! It was important that it didn’t sound like Hollywood strings.

W: That’s what was cool about Budapest, is that they were really good players but it wasn’t like the London Symphony Orchestra, where everything is immaculate. There’s weird little stuff in there that makes it sound more real.

It has the grandiosity, it has the same oomph that the pipe organ does.

W: That was really, really hard to mix.

R: ‘Turn down the bassoon! It’s not there! Wait, it’s in the flute mics! Turn down the flutes!’

What’s the maximum number of tracks on any of these songs?

W: I don’t know. The orchestral stuff is in sections, so it’s not that crazy. It’s just a lot of sound to put your finger on.

Looking back on the last time I interviewed you, just before Funeral came out, you told me that you never wanted to mix a record again.

Regine: (cracks up) And you just said it again!

W: I don’t! It’s horrible!

R: We did it three times now.

W: We did have help this time.

One thing that struck me a few months ago was that even though Nick Launay [Nick Cave, Midnight Oil, Kate Bush] and Marcus Dravs [Brian Eno, Bjork] were there, it was Win sitting at the computer 80 per cent of the time, and the entire band was in the room, or as many as possible.

W: Maybe one day we’ll be able to send stuff away and it will come back sounding exactly the way we want it. It was really great having Nick and Marcus, having other ears and having Nick set up the basic mix and we could bring the details from there.

R: For certain things, it’s easier to do it yourself and more complicated for other people.

Why did you choose the men you did to work on this record?

W: We knew we wanted a couple of different engineers, to have different approaches. We met Scott Colburn when he did a KEXP radio session for us in New York early on. He lived in Seattle and came and saw us. He had a familiar approach to recording to the way we were used to: working cheap, and finding ways to make things sound cool without being obsessed about gear. Liking good microphones, but not being obssessive about it. Then we met Marcus through [manager] Scott [Rodger] because he had done a lot of Bjork’s stuff. He came from a different approach. I think their styles complemented each other, and it was good to have different opinions.

Why bring Nick Launay in to mix it?

W: We sent a few different people a couple of songs to do test mixes on. He really got it the most. We sent him “Ocean of Noise.”

R: That’s a weird one—to mix, anyway.

W: I really like the sound of the Nick Cave stuff he’d done recently. Plus, the stuff he’d done early in his career. He did the best job of the people we sent stuff to. He got the feel of the band and really cared what we thought about stuff. It was about helping us get the sound we wanted to. He’s a very humble guy.

For someone with his wealth of experience, it looked like he enjoyed watching over your shoulder and watching you figure it out.

W: One thing I thought was really cool about Nick was that he said, ‘I realised midway through my career that I really like the first records I did. They sounded better. Then I got carried away in the 80s. When I didn’t know what I was doing, I did a better job, so now I try to have that approach now of not knowing what I’m doing.’ I thought that was really cool. You never meet people who’ve had any kind of success who don’t have this whole, ‘I know what I’m doing’ attitude. This whole, ‘I can do that because I did it before’ thing. It’s such bullshit. No one really knows what they’re doing. It’s nice when people actually admit that.

What new instruments did you acquire in your travels? I didn’t expect to see you try and play hurdy gurdy on stage. What other surprises are there here?

R: There are steel drums, but we’ve used those before. This time, though, we have bass steel drums, which are huge barrels. There’s dulcimer, but I’m not going to bring that on tour. I have too many toys.

W: There’s a lot of weird bass stuff. Will [Butler] plays a Moog Taurus quite a bit, and the low end is really weird on a lot of the songs. Tuba, and stuff like that.

R: I wanted a hurdy gurdy for so long, since I was in a medieval band. I play piano, and there was no piano in medieval times, so I had to play recorders and tambourine and mandolin and stuff [she still sounds frustrated]. But they were so expensive and I couldn’t afford them. I saw one in France, it was from Austria at this fair, and seriously, I couldn’t sleep all night thinking about it. But I couldn’t have it because I was poor and had student loans. It was like being in love and being obsessed. So when we went back to tour 10 years later, I got one. It’s funny, because I’m not in my medieval band anymore.

When you get something like that—hurdy gurdy, steel drums—are you tempted to suddenly put it on everything?

R: No, no.

W: It’s more like you hear things and think, ‘One day that will be really good.’ I still don’t feel we’ve used the bass steel drums the way I want to hear them. When we heard them on our honeymoon, in this weird community centre in Tobago, these teenagers were playing it. We could hear the sound from across the town, and it was really mysterious. It’s not that prominent on the record, so I do want to nail that one on a certain song. Sometimes having stuff that your hands aren’t familiar with helps you come up with different chords. We have an omnichord, and “Ocean of Noise” was written on it.

The vocals are very front and centre here. Both the lead vocals—and your vocals, Win, are stronger than I’ve ever heard them live or on record before—and the backing vocals, which are treated in a much more choral fashion here than typical two or three part harmonies. A lot of times the backing vocals bleed with the orchestra, sounding one and the same. Were there certain things you wanted to achieve vocally here?

W: Before this record, I’ve always sung about an octave above my range. Kind of on purpose. “Tunnels” and “Power Out” are definitely too high for my natural singing voice, but for what the songs are about it kind of made sense. This record is definitely the lower end of my voice. “Neon Bible” has the lowest notes I can sing. “Intervention” is pretty low. Singing “Keep the Car Running” feels so good, because it’s the only song we have that’s exactly in my range. It doesn’t hurt to sing. I can sing as loud as I want. There’s more songs in that range.

What about the approach to backing vocals?

W: It’s having more time and not being super rushed. A lot of times we had to get something in the ballpark and that would be good enough.

R: This time we could experiment with the sounds.

W: Sometimes more is more! Sometimes less might be more, but sometimes more is more.

Yes, but is more ever less?

W: I’m sure some people will feel more is less, and think it’s too bombastic and annoying. Whatever, I feel that way sometimes too.

Lyrically, there’s a large difference between the two records. Funeral is very personal and rooted in neighbourhood, friends and family. Even a song like “Haiti” is still a very personal story about a larger topic. This record seems much more external, more extroverted. You’re also writing more in first person character. Did you notice a shift?

W: Having seen a lot of the world in a really short time, and spending more time looking outward, you don’t really choose what you’re going to be inspired to sing about, or what interests you or what you’re excited about. To me, this record is more thematically united than the last one, lyrically. It feels like over time you find different things interesting at different times in your life. This record is definitely much more engaging with the world, rather than talking about a personal experience of the world. It’s trying to understand something about the world or have some sort of connection with the world. Not in a general sense, not trying to connect to people in general, but more looking outward.

Jeremy joked that every song is either about “God or bombs.” Is that accurate?

R: (laughs) Or God bombs.

W: I wouldn’t say that’s accurate. (long pause)

There are a couple of recurring themes. Two different songs have: “save my soul, set me free” and “set my body free.” “Who here still believes in choice? not I” and “don’t want to choose between black and blue.” You also bring up forgiving and forgetting twice on the record.

R: A lot of lyrics also come from old songs. There are some pieces that are ideas not in the song but in meaning that have been floating around for a really long time. They came together in a few songs on this album.

W: I just never (long pause)… I just wanted to talk about… It’s not exclusively about religion, but it does talk about religious culture and the relationship between culture and belief and the whole thing. It was interesting talking about it in a different way than the way I hear a lot of people talking about it, trying to engage with what I actually think is going on. I haven’t thought about it that much, to be honest.

The lines about choice, and not wanting to choose: in a land of opportunity, in a society of plentitude, there’s often an illusion of choice. Especially in democracy. Theoretically you can choose, but if there’s nothing you want to choose from, then it’s not a real choice.

W: I remember at the end of the first big tour in the States. We were in Boston. Jeremy was the tour manager, and he had taken off. There were all these journalists from France there and we had to ship the gear off to Europe. Regine and I were in this hotel room. I remember that night, I was working on a song that turned into “Windowsill.” It was really sinking in that I didn’t live in the States anymore. Coming back, I felt like a foreigner. Having that experience was a very strange feeling. I remember reading Terry Gilliam saying that when he moved to England, that all his art became about the States. I definitely have that experience of living in a country your whole life, and then to have a different perspective on it. Not in a judgemental way, like ‘you stupid Americans’ kind of way. But feeling like I’m looking in on something.

How do you think that song will go over when you play it in the States? Are you setting yourself up for a Dixie Chicks situation?

W: (quickly and dismissively) Oh, I don’t care. Hopefully people understand. I don’t know. Not everything is literal.

That song is interesting for several reasons. One of them is the expatriate-ism, if you will, about someone not wanting to assume responsibility for mistakes made by their country, or worried about blowback. I also wonder if the “don’t want to see it at my windowsill” plays into the NIMBY syndrome. There are several different ways the song could go.

W: Yep. (long pause) It will be interesting, because it could be taken different ways.

There’s lots of apocalyptic imagery on the record, and some of it is obviously drawn from headlines, but were there any specific books or films or personal encounters that inspired anything on this record?

W: (long pause, coughs) Some things are too personal. (another long pause) I remember when we went to Brazil for the first time, we were staying in Sao Paulo and driving through these slums, miles and miles of shanty towns, and then pulling up to the Hyatt Regency where we were staying, which was a big compound with barbed wire and a guard and stuff. Not being able to go outside because they tell you that they’ll kill you to steal your wallet. It was a very strange experience. That was the beginning of the idea for “Black Wave.”

How late in the game did you change the title of “Building Downtown”? Is the original title public knowledge at all?

W: It’s not public knowledge for legal reasons. I’d say the parentheses are symbolic.

What are the parentheses?

W: The song is called “Antichrist Television Blues,” and it’s in parentheses. It’s symbolic because we had to think about it a lot.

The character might be sleazy, but what makes him the antichrist?

W: I’m not saying he’s the antichrist. I don’t know, is he? As much as anyone, I guess. I just don’t think dads should manage their daughters.

Is the “Neon Bible” at all related to this? [I pull out document] Do you know about this?

W: No, what is it?

Harris Country, outside of Houston, has a monument outside the courthouse with a bible lit by neon light. There was a big Supreme Court case last year where an atheist challenged its presence, arguing that it violated the separation between church and state.

R: Oh wow, no, we didn’t know about this. [both peruse it]

Was the title at all related to the John Kennedy Toole novel?

W: It’s a physical thing you see from time to time, a neon sign on a church.

R: Like right here [she gestures to Ontario St. E.], there’s one right around the corner.

W: I thought of the name a while ago, and then read the book and thought, “Oh, too bad I can’t use that.” But as the record went on, I knew it was the title of the record. I’d thought of it as an idea, and then I read his other book, Confederacy of Dunces, and then heard reference to this book. It was more inspiring to me that a 16-year old wrote a book that isn’t the best book in the world but deals with some interesting themes. The idea of a 16-year old writing a novel instead of watching TV and doing whatever 16-year olds do is pretty inspiring.

How old was he when he wrote Dunces?

W: He was maybe 35 or something. Those are the only two things he published—well, he didn’t, but his mom did afterwards. [pauses to give directions to the driver] We’re using some traditional chord progressions on this record. I remember working on “Antichrist Television Blues,” and it was very strange playing a blues progression.

R: You thought it was funny!

W: I thought, “Hey, I can’t do this.” Then I realised, “Oh yeah, you can. It’s called the blues! People have been doing it for a long time.” When Regine first played the chords for “Intervention,” it sounds familiar, traditional.

R: It’s like a hymn.

W: I found it really inspiring to work within some traditional chord progressions.

R: It’s like the melody and the chords, the voicings, it’s very church-y.

[arrive at their home, interview over]