Will Butler, guitarist for Arcade Fire, is promoting his forthcoming solo album Policy by doing an advertising campaign with The Guardian. It won't be anything at all like Blur's cryptic advertisement announcing Magic Whip last week: Butler will teams up with the British newspaper to release a new song a day based on an article in that publication (from NME).
The brother of Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler said that he found all sorts of salacious material in the news that he feels makes for good narratives anyhow.
"It's a cruel thing, but sometimes you read something and think, 'Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that.' Something like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn trial," he said, citing the ongoing trial of the French former International Monetary Fund managing director. "My God, that's the gnarliest story in the world, but it's interesting. Or you might read a science headline and think, "The universe is so much bigger than I thought it was." There's something really beautiful in that."
Those songs will start to come out on Monday, February 23 and there will be a new release through the week.
How he got hooked up with The Guardian, versus a paper in Arcade Fire's homeland of Canada or his own birthplace in the United States, is unknown. At least The Guardian is a more upstanding publications in the UK, compared to the relatively typical tabloid fodder of The Sun.
The album itself is due to come out on March 16. Butler had previously told the press that the notion of releasing a solo album didn't strike him until the success of his score for Her, which earned he and fellow Arcade Fire touring member/composer Owen Pallett an Oscar nomination during 2014. Butler's brother and wife Régine Chassagne were supposed to be handling the film's score but had to drop out due to her pregnancy. Will stepped into the role and found himself a rather competent songwriter indeed.
