SING A SONG OF SORROW

With the elegiac 'Funeral', The Arcade Fire have made the world sit up and take notice. Lead singer Win Butler talks to Jim Carroll

Many strange things have happened to Win Butler and The Arcade Fire in the past six months. Strange things always happen to bands who release startling debut albums which make the world sit up and take notice. Some day, Butler figures, he'll get a chance to stop and think about some of these things which just keep on occurring. He may even laugh some more about the Christmas EP which was never a Christmas EP.

Back in 2001, band members and friends gathered for a Christmas hooley at Butler's apartment in Montreal. Drink was taken, food was consumed and songs were sung. One friend produced a tape-recorder and even more songs were sung.

Three years later, with The Arcade Fire's Funeral album the recipient of universal rave reviews and increasing sales, A Very Arcade Xmas surfaces.

Fans squeal with delight as they download versions of O Holy Night and Jingle Bell Rock. Respected online magazines review the Christmas EP with gusto. Perspective takes a running jump out the nearest window and lands head first in the dumpster.

"The funny thing about that was you had all these so-called fans of the band talking about this so-called EP and they couldn't tell that it was not me singing," says Butler. "It's a tape recording that a friend of ours made with loads of people singing over at my house, but suddenly it becomes a new Arcade Fire EP. It makes me laugh."

As he finishes off a sandwich in Stockholm in the middle of yet another day answering yet more questions about where the band got their name, Win Butler sounds somewhat bemused. You get the distinct impression that bemusement has been an everyday fact of life for Butler and his fellow band-members since Funeral was released last September in the United States.

It's an album which will stop you in your tracks. It's big on all those things which rock refuses to engage with any more. Songs of sorrow and loss and life and death provide stepping stones to music and moods which are by turns emotive, elegant, passionate and romantic. Written and recorded during a period when band members were mourning the deaths of relatives, Funeral reveals itself slyly as a thing of strange, incandescent beauty.

"From how I see it, people are responding to the songs pretty holistically; they're getting the lyrics and they're getting the melodies," says Butler. "It's not the coolest thing to talk about parents or family relationships in rock songs. I really like Mother by John Lennon, but it's the only one of its kind that I can think of. But these relationships are important and we should think about and explore them a lot, which is why they've formed the basis for a lot of our songs."

Funeral's genesis began when Houston-born Butler moved to Montreal in 2000 to make music and write songs. He went looking for like-minded souls and found Régine Chassagne, whose family had fled Duvalier's Haiti in the 1960s. In time, other musicians joined the fledgling Arcade, including Win's younger brother Will and two Montreal musicians, Richard Parry and Tim Kingsbury. In time too, Butler would marry Chassagne.

Montreal, says Butler, is a very good place to be in a band contemplating life. "You might get a million great bands from New York and Los Angeles, but you get a much healthier scene at the edges and away from these centres. You find people who are making music who're not doing so to become big stars or get on MTV."

It's perhaps ironic, then, that an album created in such splendid isolation and with so few expectations around it has given The Arcade Fire this high profile. Even more ironic when it's an album which deals with themes which, Butler admits, are somewhat uncool.

"There's an idea about coolness in rock that I've never related to much," he says. "What has happened to rock as a performance medium is that there's now as many rules to rock as there are to any other musical form like classical or jazz. But really, there's no formula when it comes to songs. There's nothing which says people only dig songs about X, so we tend to make music about what we're interested in.

"What was happening in our personal lives when we were making the record brought to our attention what was going on in the music rather than it being a straight correlation."

Before he found his way to Canada, Butler majored in religious studies at Concordia College in New York. "I studied scripture interpretation. I looked at how different people get different meanings out of the same text and studied a lot of medieval Jewish, Islamic and Christian texts." He's well placed, then, to understand why people are seeing so many disparate things in his record.

"I suppose it's inevitable because it's an album which lends itself to searching out connections between the songs. Some people come up with these really detailed ideas of what's going on without ever coming near what the real intention behind the songs was. That's good because it means they're listening to it with a real intensity."

Butler is a polite and engaging interviewee, but you can sense he'd rather be anywhere but at the other end of a phone talking about himself. "The worst place you can be as an artist is to be looking in the mirror all the time and focusing on yourself and talking about yourself," he says. "It gets really distracting and takes you away from what you want to express in the music."

Yet he knows the end will, with time, justify the means. "We're doing all this press and promotion because we want people to know about the record and for people to come along to our shows when we play. I imagine it's going to get worse before it gets better. All jobs have drawbacks, but there are many pluses to this one. It's amazing to have the opportunity to come over to Europe and do all that.

"Most bands lose money when they come to Europe, so to be in a place where we can afford to come over here and play and meet different people and see different places is fantastic."

Funeral is out now on Merge/Rough Trade