When Will Butler and I sit down for our conversation, we talk a lot about a positive, joyful, even effortless way of making art. It fits the atmosphere that surrounds him and his band Sister Squares, who are playing at a small club in Berlin, very well. The gig, Will happily tells me, is sold out that night. They are running a bit late, so they soundcheck until shortly before doors open, and once I am there, I am invited to sit and watch and to “just grab Will”, when he comes off stage.
There is only one wardrobe that they are all sharing, Will warns me, so people might come in and change while we talk. Everyone keeps rushing in and out, grabbing clothes, making tea, saying hi. The whole vibe is more one of a theatre wardrobe than backstage at a rock show. Sister Squares are Miles Francis, Julie Shore, Jenny Shore and Sara Dobbs. They are so much more than a backing band, which is why they are now officially Will Butler + Sister Squares and their new album is titled just that. It’s new and fresh as a way of working, but all of them go back a long way, as childhood friends and high school sweethearts, working together half of their lives. But in a creative sense too, their bond has become closer over the years. With this new album, they are working more than ever as a collective, with Will and Miles producing the record and everyone contributing vocals, the three women in an almost eerie, siren- like fashion, beautiful and uncanny at the same time. There is a lot of joy around Will Butler + Sister Squares, but also a lot of depth and an extraordinary sense of camaraderie, which makes itself known in the way they switch easily between joking and focussing intently during soundcheck.
In 2022, Will Butler announced that he was leaving Arcade Fire, the band he had been part of for more than 20 years. He described it as maybe the hardest decision of his life. Meeting him that night, surrounded by friends and family who form a band in a seemingly casual way, and later playing to a room full of people who clearly cherish every moment of their stunning performance, it looks like he has found his most happy place. I feel like I might have repeated it a bit too often during our conversation, but it really is pretty cool.
Okay, I’m starting with a confession. Of your three solo albums, I have to say, this one is my favourite.
Mine too! (laughs)
Or is the youngest baby always the favourite?
I mean, I love “Policy” and it’s great, but it was by design quick and more effortless, tossed off, like “here’s the thing”. And this is a real band record. I made it with Miles and the band. It’s just more three-dimensional. I love two-dimensional art. But I also love three-dimensional art (laughs).
I know you’ve worked with all these people before and for a long time. But this one really sounds like a real collective effort to me.
It’s people in a room, it’s voices in a room. And it’s different voices in a room. I mean, we’re all friends and we all share history, but you still get a sense of a different perspective from the people. Which I think makes it a richer record.
And I heard that your intention was initially to go super solo, to just hide in a cellar and do your thing…
I think everyone in the pandemic was like: “Well, I’m alone, what do I do? I’m making music by myself.” Well, no… it’s not that fun to make music by yourself. I mean, it can be. And some of those things got transmitted into the record. Some of the things were made solo, but then I sent them to Miles, I sent them to Julie, we chopped them up, we used them as ingredients. Which also gave a sense of history to the record. It also gives it greater depth, that it’s made over time.
We’ve talked about this before. I always liked that the physical aspect of dance is such an important part of your work. And I feel like it’s coming together even more on this record.
My wife Jenny, who is in the band: we were doing dance shows 20 years ago in Chicago, in college. We collaborated on some stuff back then, so to me, it’s just a through-line. And she and Sara, who is in the band as well, have been in theatre stuff and dancing together since they were teenagers, like since they were kids. It goes way back and all the way through.
It’s also very a bold album, I think.
Yeah, in the back half it gets pretty experimental in a couple of places. Like: “Can we put this here? Yeah, we can!” You can move through it. I don’t know, it hangs together… I love a record you can listen to, but this one really works like a run-through-the-park-to-it (laughs). You’re following a beat, then you lose yourself for a minute, then you’re following a beat… it works for me like a running record. You know, some records are driving-all-night-records, and this is a pretty good running record.
I recently talked with another artist about music and physical dance in comparison, and we were discussing which one of the two is the more unlimited form of art. What do you think?
I mean, they are both pretty primal. They are both pretty deep in the human mind, music and movement and movement and music. Both of them have… you can be a naive dancer or a naive musician, or you can be the most trained musician, the most trained dancer. And there are different expressions you can achieve with that. I have always been more on the punk side and more on the naive expression side. Even just sound, before music, expressing yourself through sound and expressing yourself through gesture, before you’re expressing yourself through music and dance… I don’t know, me and Jenny, we have kids. We have an eleven-year-old and we have five-year-old twins. And one of the twins really can express himself through dance quite naturally. While his sister, she loves dance, but she is more expressive in music. And you can’t tell if it’s a nature or nurture thing. It seems like an individual thing.
That is so interesting, to see which traits of yours they are naturally picking up on.
It’s really interesting. We are raising them the same, but they are turning out different.
You know what my daughter said, when I put on your record for the first time? She was like: “Oh, we haven’t listened to that one for quite a while.” And I said: “Yeah, we haven’t actually listened to it yet.” She felt it sounded very familiar.
Yeah (laughs). I think it has that sense, where it feels old, and it feels new. She’s not the only one who has said that. It doesn’t feel like a Bob Marley record, but it kinda feels like a Bob Marley record (laughs). There is something familiar about it.
It suits that you named your inspirations for making it listening to Morrissey, Shostakovich and the Spotify Top 50. I found that really funny. I didn’t even know there was something like the Spotify Top 50.
It’s interesting, huh? It’s so bizarre! Some of it is garbage, some of it is interesting garbage. But some of it is so Avant Garde! It’s so from a different world than I would ever think of how to make music. And sometimes there’s something really lovely that just naturally people get into, and sometimes it’s just horrible things and I don’t know how they came to be there. I find it so interesting.
I checked it out, and I barely know anything that’s on there. Especially not on the German ones.
Isn’t that wild? (laughs) Part of it is age, part of it is engagement, and part of it is just how culture works. There’s huge things that make no splash, but they make money. Is it just background music? What’s going on there? It’s very mysterious.
It sounds like a weird combination of influences, but listening to the record, it totally makes sense.
I think for all of us it was trying to tap into things that we grew up with, but not in a nostalgic way. Not like it was better then. But just like: “Oh, where did that come from? What’s going on?” The last one on the record is a Chopin nocturne, something that Julie’s been playing for 30 years on the piano. Things like: “Oh let’s sample this, it’s something I played on the clarinet when I was ten.” Just that sort of thing, trying to make something out of it. Just trying to avoid being nostalgic. Like, this is where I am now, but this is where I came from. Just trying to be… not documentary about it, but… poetic documentary (laughs).
I love this. I have quite a problem with nostalgia. And I feel like the overall need for it seems to be getting stronger – maybe because the times are so rough right now?
It’s hard to tell if it’s emerging from material conditions or if it’s emerging from cultural psychic conditions… it’s hard to tell. Or is it just because of how the internet works? In some way culture feels stalled, but in other ways it feels like there’s a thousand flowers blooming. It’s hard to figure it out! My brain isn’t big enough to figure it out (laughs).
What makes me really angry is, when people act like there is no credible, good music out there anymore. As if everything good stopped right after the 80ies. It’s just not true.
It’s very much not true. There are so many interesting things happening, and a lot of it is in a genre that you don’t know and I don’t know. Just things happening. There are cool kids making stuff, it’s happening. It definitely travels different. Like, in the 80ies things travelled, and interesting things don’t travel in the same way. But it’s there, it exists. And maybe even, in absolute terms, there’s more of it. But there is also a lot more randomness (laughs). It takes more effort to discover stuff. Or maybe I’m just more tired (laughs). Our eleven-year-old has had Spotify for five years or something and has listened to everything, has followed links and listened to it and likes pop music but also some weird stuff. It’s all over the place. I like it, it feels cool, there is a real relationship there. “Okay cool, you like this and you like that. How did you find that?” – “Oh, that was on a YouTube video or something…” I like that!
And the process of implementing all these ideas and sentiments into your album, did that come easily to you? Or was it more of a struggle? Because even if there is some darker stuff in it, the record as a whole sounds quite effortless to me.
It was pretty effortless. I mean, me and Miles jumped into making the record. And when we started making the record, we didn’t know what we were doing. We worked together for years, but we hadn’t worked together on that level, and it was very effortless. It was musically conversational and exciting. Julie would send an idea, it would be exciting and we would build on it. It was an insane amount of work, but very enjoyable work. Like fun problems to solve, not dark problems to solve. Even when the song is dark, it wasn’t a horrible problem to solve, it was an exciting thing to figure out. For the most part, I think so (laughs). It’s about joyfully aspiring to something and falling short in a very human way. I know a lot of depressed people who make great music, there is something to be said for that (laughs). But this crew… it’s so funny, we’re kinda old to be starting something fresh, in a certain way. But we’re all pretty fresh faced about it. It’s very open and very pure. There is a purity to this process. It was very pleasant doing it. In one simple way, this is not a career decision or anything. We’re trying to make something and we try to find out what’s going on (laughs). And we all go way back with each other, all of this is very intimate. It’s like: “We are something, let’s make something.”
But speaking about depression, you can’t hit the high notes if you don’t know the sound of the low notes, can you?
Yeah. It takes a lot of soulful effort to do anything. I mean, I don’t know, sometimes people just toss stuff out (laughs). But the work has to come from somewhere. Like with kids, there’s a nature/nurture thing. I think a lot of people in a dark place who make amazing stuff – if they weren’t making amazing stuff, they would still be in a dark place. They just wouldn’t be making something beautiful. You know, it’s good they are making something beautiful, even though I wish they were happier. I don’t know if not creating would make them happier…
I’m so glad we are at least moving further and further from the perception that you need to be troubled to be a credible artist.
Or you need to be a bad person. No, you don’t, really… you know, some people are jerks by nature and hopefully you can forgive them and hopefully they are not horrible jerks. But you don’t have to lean into that, necessarily (laughs).
I am absolutely convinced that creating a positive, nurturing environment to work in is so good for any kind of art. You don’t need to suffer for the cause, to make great art.
I am working on a play now that just opened off Broadway, with an amazing director named Daniel Aukin, who is all just about preserving degrees of freedom for the actors. Making the thing that he wants to make but keeping it alive. You need people to consent to the process to keep it alive. You don’t have to break them to form them into something. You can form people into something in a more beautiful way. I mean, there’s different ways of making theatre, but it’s been wonderful watching someone whose whole process is keeping the thing alive. And it does really fit with a more modern conception of kindness and consent and boundaries. The play is amazing, and the directing is amazing, people love it. It’s called “Stereophonic” and it’s getting really great reviews. It’s super cool. It works, you can do that! I thought you could do that, and you can do that (laughs).
That is so cool. You’re literally living your best life right now.
(laughs) Thank you. No, it’s wild.
You know, when I try to find out why something touches me, or maybe why not, I always look at it like that: You need to know what your story is, what it is you want to tell. And then find the right means to express it.
Yeah!
Big final question: What would you say is your story?
Oh God… (laughs) We went through a long phase, in the States at least, of personal narrative and your story and memoir, and some amazing work came out of that. But I find myself not in that tradition. But what I’ve taken from that tradition, because my personal story in some ways is extraordinarily boring… but there’s a lot of meaning in artistic encounters I’ve had. Encounters with music or particularly with books. I just read books all the time, it’s horrible, I just read books all the time (laughs). Like, literature is building your soul. That’s kind of my narrative, hearing Shostakovich when you’re eleven and it’s changing your soul. Having something of 20thcentury Russia in you and kind of intuiting that it’s so complicated that you will never comprehend it. But also, even as an eleven-year-old, feeling something that’s very unclear, but you feel it! A lot of it is the things that touch you when you’re 16, 17, 18, like the Radiohead album that came out when I was 18. How did that build me? I met a lot of people from a lot of different circumstances. I’ve met teenagers in Haiti who heard Neil Young and were like: “I wanna play acoustic guitar!” Just building that interior self through the encounter with art. As a narrative it can be ferociously boring (laughs). But making it into a piece of art, hopefully then it continues the process. Hopefully then it’s touching someone else’s soul, adding into their concept, to their romantic journey. Does that make sense?
It totally does. Thank you, Will.
Photo © Alexa Viscius