Arcade Fire’s Will Butler has confirmed the release of his first solo album. The Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist calls Policy a collection of “American music”, and says it will be released on 16 March 2015.
As hinted earlier in November, Butler’s solo debut will be released by Merge Records, the same label that represents Arcade Fire in the United States. Although his bandmate Jeremy Gara played drums on the LP, Butler played almost everything else himself. If his older brother Win appears on Policy, it is only as one of the unnamed “other musicians” who “contributed woodwinds and backing vocals”.
On 24 November, Zane Lowe premiered Butler’s song Take My Side on BBC Radio 1. While the noisy rock’n’roll track might remind Arcade Fire fans of the band’s singles Month of May or Joan of Arc, it and the rest of Policy are indebted to a longer list of musical artists, according to a press release: it’s “in the tradition of the Violent Femmes, the Breeders, the Modern Lovers, Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, the Magnetic Fields, Ghostface Killah”. Not to mention John Lennon, whose work is apparently “American music”.
Record label Merge said Policy was recorded at Electric Lady Studio in Jimi Hendrix’s old living room, the same New York building where Arcade Fire mixed much of their latest record. It is also where David Bowie recorded his cameo for the band’s album Reflektor.
Although this is Butler’s solo debut, other Arcade Fire members have contributed to numerous side projects, including Gara’s work with singer-songwriter Michael Feuerstack, classical music composed by Richard Reed Parry, and violinist Sarah Neufeld’s recent LP, Hero Brother.
