Will Butler, “His Brother’s Band,” and the Old Flame

Only rarely does a band reach a stage of recognition where they no longer need to be named, let alone introduced. “A certain band from Montreal” has become a code name — used in the first issue of Analogue, but in common trade by various DJs as well — for only one band from Montreal. They join the likes of Radiohead and U2, which defined Oxford and Dublin in much the same way. The difference, of course, is that Arcade Fire has only released two full-length albums and an EP, and has been on the radar for about three years. The Oxford gentlemen will mark fifteen years of music next year, and the Dublin lads now have twenty-six. All three bands have been called the best in the world by reputable music magazines at assorted high points of their careers. This is either a lot of pressure on one relatively young, talented, and earnest group of people, or it is a truly twisted new level of hype.

It is tempting to put it down to the latter, and say that Arcade Fire is a fluke of the market, that rare case when something packaged and recommended as “good music” convinces everyone at once. Top-ten lists are mostly an echo chamber; the right critic makes an album great. Agents and companies manufacture success, and this time they did it well. It’s certainly true that there has been no shortage of hype. In some music circles, this has provoked the first Great Arcade Fire Backlash, because for the insecure connoisseur, popularity is a sure sign that something is wrong with the music.

It turns out, however, that Arcade Fire is an even rarer case than perfect market synergy. It is the case where the music, the albums, the band, and the live show are in fact that good. It is the case where Bono hears you and decides he wants to use your song as entrance music on his tour, and later asks your band to open for his. (You are able to say no.) It is the case where David Bowie buys up boxfuls of your debut album to give away to his friends for Christmas, then comes and sings with you in Radio City Music Hall. This type of success is not about what management, record companies, and marketers did well. It is about the transcendent power of what the musicians carved from noise and silence.

What is the role of music journalism when confronted with this achievement? Naturally, the impulse is to convince as many people as possible to take notice and listen. That task done, however, what can be added to what the band has already done? Who would rather read a review of a great album than listen to a great album? Criticism is always secondary to the thing itself. The risk is creating more distrust and exhaustion with excessive praise that the music manifestly does not need. It is thus with no small amount of trepidation that I enter the fray, add to the flood of ink that has already been spilled in the name of Arcade Fire, and tell a more personal story about the experience of their music. While the band may need no introduction, one of its members might. Also, I have a rather unusual story.

I met Will Butler because in the summer of 2004, he was travelling around Europe with my ex-girlfriend. All three of us had gone to the same college in Chicago, but I had graduated two years before them and moved to Berlin. In spite of the potentially awkward conditions, the terms were sufficiently amicable that I could happily host the two of them in my apartment, cooking them food and giving tours of the city, for three days. I had a guitar sitting in the house which was occasionally picked up by various residents and played. From this, it emerged that Will was part of a band, mainly as a percussionist. We learned that we had both attended boarding school — rivals, actually — and that we shared an interest in poetry and Slavic languages and literature, both of which he was studying. There were some other obvious matters of taste in which we did not disagree. We laughed a great deal, walked a great deal, and found a certain comfort particular to recent strangers. It was a few months before Funeral was released in the United States, but I like to think that while he was in my home, he already had the songs kicking around in his head: his crazy drum, his brother’s crazy voice.

I said goodbye to them as they boarded a high-speed train on the tracks at Zoologischer Garten, the same “Zoo Station” of a certain Dublin band with whom Will (and his brother) would later refuse to tour the world. I could write that I knew I’d see him again, or her, but there was at most only the mirage of a hope. I can no longer see clearly how I felt, standing there or walking home. I can hear songs that were in his head then only because they’re in my head now. From here, all of us are infected with the awareness of what Will would become, just as this story is infected by its journalistic context, by the illustration on the cover.

Not having really paid attention, I missed any connection to Will Butler when America put Funeral on its top ten lists of 2004. As the album wasn’t released in Ireland until 2005, I hadn’t sought out or heard the music yet. I was in Chicago that January, fighting the snow and ordering a coffee, when Will and I saw each other through the window of a café. We caught up only briefly, and he said rather excitedly that he was leaving school to play in “his brother’s band.” I wrote down the name of this band, and said I would find it when I returned to Ireland.
I had no idea it would be so easy. When I walked into Tower on Wicklow Street, Funeral was posted on the wall, number sixteen on the European charts. I took it home and listened, but I can’t say anything about this. I pored over the liner notes, looking for Will. He isn’t there in person; he missed the photo shoot. He pointed out to me last month, during his impromptu visit to Trinity FM, that he is the extra shadow on the wall in the photo of the band. They had tried to add his face with Photoshop, but when that didn’t work, they just gave him a shadow.
Will as a shadow: this is an inherently poetic idea. Will’s enjoyment of himself as a shadow: this is a characteristic of the poet, not the rock star. He did go back to school in the end and finished with a thesis of poems, which I’ve never read. I trust him to have found the right words. He laughs the laugh of the keen observer, relishing the small absurdities of modern life and, increasingly, the large absurdities of his own life. At his level, it remains one of the most difficult and most demanding jobs in the world to play two days on, one day off. In particular, the degree of commitment for which the band has become justly famous means that each time they perform, they risk everything.

No man was ever less of a shadow on stage. Will climbs the truss, throws the drums, wears the helmet, and on occasion tackles others while playing. Somehow he never loses the rhythm. His catharsis becomes ours through sheer fearlessness, through absolute force; this is the essence of rock performance, and something unique to that art form. Offstage, even directly after a show, he is surprisingly quiet, and as generous and attentive as he was previously insane. He is loyal to the imperatives of form; in rock and in life, he is concentrated, energized, wide-eyed, awake. This just has different results in different worlds.

After their show in the Brixton Academy this March, I heard a man congratulate Will personally on his performance, and when I commented on how familiar he looked, Will simply said, “Oh, that was Ed from Radiohead.” Oh, right. Ed. Will is unfazed; this is not uncommon. This is his job. He’s doing what he knows how to do, what he needs to do. We might feel indebted, as I certainly do, but the band seems to lavish us with music with the sole expectation that we will enjoy it, that it will matter to us. Everyone has their own story of the music, and to remember the commonality and scale of this in the face of our own emotions is humbling.

There are two reasons that Bono, Bowie, and Ed are drawn to their shows. First, they all react at the same level that we do — like Will himself, these are people first, not celebrities — and they know the real when they hear it. Second, though, is the recognition of themselves. Arcade Fire is seriously attempting to fulfill its own potential. Through the mysterious alchemy of love and risk, this potential is virtually limitless; it’s bigger than Funeral in the same way that Radiohead’s was bigger than The Bends. Critics who say that Neon Bible is no Funeral are as short-sighted as the fans who kept asking for “Creep” a decade later. These questions may be worth asking when the band is on LP ten or LP twenty, continuing to make the music that summons them most urgently at that time, evolving their lineup, their style, their instrumentation. When I asked him whether the ever-growing success of the band is changing the tours, Will was enigmatically accurate, saying that this time is no more different than the other times were different.

It’s a good lesson in fame, particularly in Will’s fame, that nothing was particular or unique in our first meeting or in our most recent goodbye. People are people, and friendship is friendship. I can’t help but think that Arcade Fire’s success is rooted in this same realisation, and that this is one source of their authenticity on stage. Their own story is about marriage, brotherhood, friends, family, and loss. They have placed so much priority on reflecting this in the music that anyone similarly situated — that is, anyone who has suffered or rejoiced in the business of living — hears themselves.

Craig Thorn, Mark Kozelek, and the Red House Painters

If you’re browsing a music shop, or for that matter a music magazine, it doesn’t take long to learn the first law of art: the world is full to the brim with failed geniuses. The right combination of talent and drive is rare enough. But with mass media, the talent doesn’t matter much anymore; whether you’re hawking “pop” albums or reviewing “indie” albums, it’s often the image, not the music, that is being sold. This brings us to the second law of art: the world is equally full of the successfully talentless. The amount of pure luck and coincidence involved in commercial success makes it virtually impossible to predict, much less understand.

The musical situation thus becomes painful for everyone involved. Record companies turn down the best albums, because they’re too risky. Reviewers, DJs, and the dwindling owners of great record shops exhaust themselves looking for something obscure enough to seem cool, but good enough to justify. Consumers of music — people who want to experience perhaps 60 minutes of timeless human joy on which no price can be placed, other than €18.99 at HMV — are lost in the supermarket. We are told to buy an album because it’s played at Starbucks, or because the single opens that TV show that we like, or because the magazine owned by the conglomerate that recorded, marketed, and distributed it thinks it’s a masterpiece.

This is why we have friends. In an offhand remark in the acknowledgements of his book Mystery Train — a book good enough to read the acknowledgements — Greil Marcus wrote this line: “As much as anything, rock ‘n’ roll has been the best means to friendship that I know.” I always misremember this line as stating something like the equation “music = friendship.” While Marcus doesn’t quite say this, I feel I should attribute the idea to him. Friendship might indeed arise from sharing the music, but in my life it often led me to the music in the first place.

I met Craig Thorn eleven years ago this autumn, when I moved to Boston from Texas to attend boarding school. He ran my dormitory, where he made epic barbecue and brilliant jokes, as well as the English department, where he taught a class on junk (of all kinds) in American literature. Our first conversation was about music; this was how he learned about each of the 38 guys to whom he had to be a father each year. In that conversation, I revealed my interest in an English band called Catherine Wheel, one of the great underrated rock combos of the nineties. If this earned me a modicum of his respect, the ensuing dialogue earned Craig my undying admiration, tinged with a kind of terror; he promptly named five other more obscure (but technically related) bands that I might enjoy if I liked Catherine Wheel. Basically, he was Pandora, in the days before the internet.

Craig’s boundless musical knowledge and record collection were intimidating to encounter for the first time, but I quickly realized that they were made to share. He ran a student magazine — Backtracks — in which he wrote lengthy, almost philosophical music criticism; he was a manager and legendary DJ for the school radio station. It was impossible to meet him and not find your horizons expanded. While this might have started with something as simple as borrowing a CD, the real horizons in question were not musical, but human. More than simply a means to friendship, music held the possibility for Craig of an encounter with the whole world, a catalogue of experience wider than his own. Music was a means to, and a definition of, family and community. Both were his reason for living.

Such a man does not have a favourite band. Nonetheless, in the late nineties, Craig was a missionary of the Red House Painters. He wrote about them, it seemed, at every possible opportunity, in school publications as well as major magazines. I have none of these articles anymore, but I remember a blizzard of eloquence that convinced me to knock on his door one day and borrow everything they had ever recorded. I saw Songs for a Blue Guitar on sale in 1998 in Chicago, at a record store that no longer exists, and bought it immediately. Gradually I collected every disc, somewhat because I liked the music, but mainly because of Craig.

The Red House Painters formed in 1989, the same year that the Pixies came to take the kids. They made a decade’s worth of albums in San Francisco, after which the lead singer and driving force, Mark Kozelek, went amicably solo. Their quiet and introspective music was never quite in step with the times, which were more defined by loud introspection; the poor reviews said that the Red House Painters were about despair, while the good ones said they were about nostalgia. Success on a massive commercial scale eluded them, partly because Mark Kozelek is that kind of genius who finds self-promotion painful, and partly because he insisted on making the music that was necessary for him. If others see him as a failed genius, it is not how Kozelek sees himself; on the contrary, his album was in stores when he was 25, and he felt like a rock star. In 1999 a two disc Retrospective was released; regardless of sales, this doesn’t happen to just anyone.
The first label to press a Red House Painters album was the formidable 4AD, which released Down Colorful Hill (1992) on the strength of some reverb-soaked demo tapes. It was followed with two self-titled albums, better known by their brooding cover images, Rollercoaster (May 1993) and Bridge (October 1993). The stunning Ocean Beach was released in 1995, and then abruptly — in the face of a small but obsessive fan base, excellent critical reception, and growing popularity in Europe — the label opted not to release Songs for a Blue Guitar, and dropped the band.

For those DJs, reviewers, buyers, and label owners who are prospecting for gold, it’s usually a pretty good sign when a label drops a band over an album. As Robbie Robertson said of The Band, “Music should never be harmless.” A fight over a recording signals that something actually different has just appeared, and that someone in power is scared; Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a classic example, but the final two Red House Painters albums each did time in legal purgatory. Supreme Records, an Island subsidiary, snapped up Songs for a Blue Guitar and released it in 1996; the follow-up Old Ramon was scheduled for 1998, but was withheld by Island during the merger wars of the late 1990s, and wasn’t released until 2001 on SubPop, after Kozelek bought it back. These struggles also ended the band, and the next four releases were of Kozelek playing alone.

Songs for a Blue Guitar was the first true synthesis of Kozelek’s many influences and moods. The opener seems to fit the pattern of the back catalogue, with a singer-songwriter formula and emotive, autobiographical lyrics. The second song, one of two title songs, is the same but different, featuring the only female backing vocal in the whole Kozelek discography. Nothing in that discography could possibly prepare you for the third song, “Make Like Paper,” which is rumoured to be one of the two songs on the disc which ended the relationship with 4AD. It is 12 minutes of fierce backbeat and Crazy Horse guitar distortion. It features a 5 minute guitar solo after the first chorus, a solo so rich and daring it suggests Hendrix, Robert Johnson, and Mahler. After the Gibson screams and is possibly in flames, Kozelek goes on singing as though nothing out of the ordinary has just occurred. It is out of the ordinary on a folk label. It might as well be hip-hop.
This is one of many moments on the album that explodes preconceptions. There are covers of songs by Yes (“Long Distance Runaround”), the Cars (“All Mixed Up”) and Paul McCartney (“Silly Love Songs”). An aptly titled, trifling piece of work, this last piece is totally resurrected in the retelling; this time, the five-minute display of absurd guitar virtuosity is at the beginning of the song. The expressive rage and unadulterated beauty offered here properly earns the opening line, “you’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs,” and when we hear the chorus that McCartney made insipid — “I love you” — we actually believe the Red House Painters. Mark Kozelek brings real artistry to his covers; his solo album from 2001, What’s Next to the Moon, consists entirely of Bon Scott-era AC/DC songs, which are tender and unrecognizable, and his most recent project with Sun Kil Moon — a kind of Red House Painters 2.0 — is the album Tiny Cities, composed of twelve Modest Mouse songs transposed into Kozelek’s reflective and minimalist style. As these seemingly insane career moves suggest, Mark Kozelek is remarkably adept at avoiding irony, even when singing songs that seem to need them. On Old Ramon, he pulls off a love song to his cat.

In 2003, Kozelek and his drummer Anthony Koutsos reformed as Sun Kil Moon, releasing first Ghosts of the Great Highway and then Tiny Cities in 2005. Ghosts continues the best traditions of the Red House Painters, but with the illusion of a new band; it was Kozelek’s most successful album to date, if someone is counting by sales. It is a lush and unified album, telling stories about famous boxers who died young; obsessed with death, the album celebrates life. The old fascinations with memory and geography are firmly in place, but the singer has become a bard, and moved well beyond simple autobiography and despair. This is no more failed genius by any measure; this is a man doing what he loves as though it were second nature.

Sun Kil Moon sounds for all the world like Kozelek has “grown up.” Somewhere between the first time I heard them and now, as I’ve moved around the world carrying the albums with me, so have I. Kozelek’s joys, sorrows, landscapes, and women have accompanied me. As always happens with great music, the sounds and words are now bound up with my own memories. I’ve done my best to pass this music on to friends so that they can carry this reflection of the world, and perhaps a piece of me. I’ve tried to make friends with the music, and music with the friends.

I also continue to listen to Kozelek’s work to carry a piece of Craig, who passed on down the great highway on 12 June 2006, at the age of 47. He left behind such a cacophonous legacy of sounds in the hands and minds of those who knew him that it hardly would be accurate to say that he is gone. The lives of those that knew him — and their CD collections — are the Retrospective that confirms his place. In his case, music finally did become the friendship, since the music is all I can encounter down the old pathways where he was. Even though the song is not about him, I have never listened to “Make Like Paper” without thinking of the first autumn that I met Craig, or the last summer that I saw him.

Leaves are turning brown
All over the ground
Leaves make like paper
Make like paper sound

[5-minute guitar solo]

Way back, back then
I considered you my best friend
But the last time I saw you
I knew I’d never see you again.