Arcade Fire’s Will Butler to write songs based on Guardian news stories

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler has announced plans to record a new song based off breaking headlines on UK broadsheet The Guardian.

With his ‘Policy’ album out on 9th March, he’ll be taking on a new story every day from Mon-Fri next week, beginning 23rd February.

Each track will be posted online to The Guardian throughout the week. Speaking about the concept, he said that Bob Dylan was the inspiration. “It would be a song he wrote in two weeks or something, such as ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, which is one of the greatest songs ever. So I’ve set myself an impossible bar.”

He continued: “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 – 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.”