will butler
Will Butler Releases First New Songs Since Arcade Fire Departure
Will Butler has released his first new music since his surprising March departure from Arcade Fire in the form of two songs from Merge Records, “A Stranger’s House” and “Nearer to Thee.” Butler will also tour this summer for the first time since 2019, with a seven-show run beginning Aug. 11 in Cambridge, Mass. Unsurprisingly, both new songs share some musical DNA with Arcade Fire, which Butler joined a couple years after his brother Win founded the band in 2001. “A Stranger’s House” and “Nearer to Thee” feature Butler’s core band of Sara Dobbs, Miles Francis, Jenny Shore and Julie Shore, who also played on his 2020 release Generations. [embedded content][embedded content] “‘A Stranger’s House’ has a rad video. ‘Nearer to Thee’ is some true gothic bullshit. I love them both,” Butler wrote o...
Will Butler Has Left Arcade Fire
It’s been a busy few days for Arcade Fire. They announced a new album and shared a new single on Thursday and played a triumphant intimate show in New York City last night. However, in a series of tweets on Saturday, founding member Will Butler announced he was no longer in the band. “Hi friends— I’ve left Arcade Fire,” Butler began. “I left at the end of last year, after the new record was complete. There was no acute reason beyond that I’ve changed—and the band has changed—over the last almost 20 years. Time for new things.” Concluding, he wrote “Thank you to anyone who’s come out to AF shows, or bought a record, or loves our music. It’s meaningful to be part of your lives. Thank you to the crew, staff, management, label people, bands, artists, and friends who have helped bring our visio...
Arcade Fire’s Will Butler on How White Privilege, Race Reporting Informed New Solo LP
The fall after Will Butler’s debut album, Policy, was released in 2015, he went to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to study…policy. After working with Partners in Health, a non-profit focused on providing global medical health care, by donating proceeds from Arcade Fire’s single “Haiti” off Funeral and licensing proceeds from NFL ads that used the band’s “Wake Up,” Butler wanted to help the organization more. It would also be a great opportunity to be exposed to people he wouldn’t have necessarily met otherwise. Studying at Harvard coincided with Donald Trump winning the presidency, intensifying Butler’s desire to investigate how the United States got to the point where this could happen and how to move forward from there. Butler studied under Leah Wright Rigueur, the histor...
Will Butler Gets Ready to Feast in ‘Bethlehem’ Video
With Generations releasing next week, Will Butler has released his third single, “Bethlehem.” Co-directed by Butler and Adrienne Anderson, the visual looks like a frenetic preparation of a feast, which the artist referred to as “a nightmare of a Flemish still life.” From meats hanging above a fire to a table that starts to overflow with food, there’s a lot going on in the clip. [embedded content] Butler explained the origin of the track in a statement below: “This song partly springs from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats: “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Like a lot of folks, I woke up after the election in 2016 mad and sad and scared and exhausted. This song is born of that emotion. My bandmates Jenny Shore, Julie Shore, ...
Arcade Fire Was Making a New Album Until, Yep, COVID
A few months ago, Win Butler subtly shared that Arcade Fire was at work on their first studio album since 2017’s Everything Now. In announcing his new solo album today (July 14), Will Butler revealed that the band was at work, but circumstances, primarily COVID-19, threw a wrench into those plans. “Arcade Fire was recording. Well, we were recording… But now our drummer is in Australia, two of us are in Canada, and the rest are in America,” Butler said in an interview with NME. “Australia are having a crazy outbreak, the border to Canada is sealed right now… like, Jesus Christ. It takes more logistics to get together. It always took a certain amount of logistics, but right now it’s insurmountable.” The problem with the sessions, at least as of now, Butler says the band won’t know ...
