Arcade Fire: A Profile of Indie Rock's Biggest and Brightest Band

The Arcade Fire's dark second album, Neon Bible, had many starting points: the war in Iraq, the church in Montreal that the seven-person band renovated and moved into, the sudden ascent that took the band from obscurity to performances with high-profile fans like David Byrne, David Bowie and U2. But, really, it all began one night in Boston, when Win Butler, the Arcade Fire's leader, had a paper bag filled with cash.

It was about two years ago, at the end of the Arcade Fire's first U.S. tour. Their debut album, Funeral, had received critical raves and become a surprise hit -- selling more than 345,000 copies worldwide -- and the group was in over its head. It didn't have a manager; drummer Jeremy Gara had been acting as tour manager but had left town without depositing the tour's receipts in a bank. Butler and his wife, R?gine Chassagne, who write the band's songs together, spent hours in their hotel room, counting the Arcade Fire's money.

Late that night, Butler wrote a song. He hadn't written much on tour, but this one came easily, expressing the alienation he was feeling: the gap between his artistic ambitions and $50,000 in a paper bag, the confusion of being an American who had moved to Canada and now felt like a tourist in his homeland. "Don't want it faster, don't want it free," Butler wrote, and "don't want to fight in a holy war," and over and over, "don't want to live in my father's house no more."

The resulting song, "Windowsill," would become the centerpiece of Neon Bible: The album, swelling with strings, horns and anguished rock, is designed to shine a light on the black mirror of American culture (see sidebar, "Bible Studies"). Despite the line "I don't wanna live in America no more," Butler now insists, "I'm so American -- definitely not Canadian by any stretch of the imagination. Everyone else in the band, if they get shitty food in a restaurant, they're almost embarrassed about it. Not me: The cornerstones of America are the Pledge of Allegiance and 'The customer is always right.'"

The Arcade Fire, ten or more people onstage, have seven official members. They swap instruments seemingly at will, and Butler says "hierarchy" like it's a dirty word; however, he's clearly the group's leader, despite the veneer of communal democracy. Or as his bandmate (and younger brother) Will Butler puts it, "We basically share the same general vision. It's not quite the Quakers, where you have to be unanimous. I guess we're a democratic republic, a federal system."