Will Butler - Friday Night (2016)

Will Butler is a primary member of Arcade Fire. Cover art by Abbi Jacobson of Comedy Central's Broad City. Friday Night includes seven tracks not previously available. Introduction by comedian Jo Firestone. Friday Night is a live album of performances from Will Butler s tour supporting his first album Policy. It was recorded mostly at Lincoln Hall in Chicago on June 4, 2015. Five of the songs are from Policy, two are songs written for the Guardian newspaper last year, and five are new. This record exists partly because I had a really good band, and I wanted to document it. Miles Arntzen (EMEFE, Antibalas) played drums (standing up at a full kit he didn't use a hi-hat pedal, so he could stand on that leg while working the kick drum with the other). Julie Shore played synth bass. Sara Dobbs played synth leads and Mellotron pads. Everybody sang backing vocals. We started almost every show with You Must Be Kidding. I thought the album should start in medias res to welcome the listener into a sweaty room with a tired, happy band and a loose crowd. So the album starts with the encore Tell Me We're All Right which was only ever played once, and this is the recording of it. We never soundchecked it. It wasn't even written yet (you might be able to tell). But Miles plays some magical fills, Sara and Julie jump in with good harmonies, and the crowd even begins a spontaneous call-andresponse at the end ( You're all right! ). This record also exists because I wrote a lot of new songs and the band got good at playing them, and I wanted to put them out to the wider world. Sometimes an artist will take a new song into the studio and polish it until there's nothing left. I wanted these songs to avoid that fate. Think of this as a comedy record. In some ways literally Brooklyn comedian Jo Firestone does the introduction and the 'solo' in Friday Night but also, it's an album based on working out ideas in a room full of people, playing off their energy and expectations. It's about taking complicated emotions and wringing communal joy from them, and then translating that joy onto record. So here you go! Will Butler, March 2016.