Arcade Fire Versus The National

Adventures At The Price Is Right And Beyond

Two bands, two critically acclaimed 2007 records and two guitarists on one phone line. Not much else comes in twos for Arcade Fire or The National, who, if you combined them, would make a 16-member performing behemoth.

Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry and The National's Bryce Dessner are such good friends that when we got them on the phone to talk about their respective albums, Neon Bible and Boxer, the rigors of touring and what it's like to share stages with David Bowie, David Byrne and Bruce Springsteen, we could barely get them to stop talking.

Here they go:

Bryce Dessner: Where are you?
Richard Reed Parry: We're in L.A.

BD: Are you playing today?
RRP: Yeah, we're playing tonight, and we played last night. Me and Tim [Kingsbury] just went in the audience for The Price Is Right. It was so awesome.

BD: What's the name of the host of that show?
RRP: CBS, the big CBS building — oh, the host. I thought you said the house. It's Bob Barker. He retires in, like, six days, I think. There were people camped out around, like, three L.A. city blocks.

BD: That is so cool.
RRP: Yeah, it's really amazing. We were on the guest list so we couldn't compete, but we were down in, like, the second row.

BD: Yeah, I bet that guest list is even tighter than your guest list!
RRP: We're so lucky. But yeah, anyway, where are you, in
New York?
BD: I'm sitting in a park kiddie-cornered to the Bowery Ballroom.

RRP: This is night three?
BD: This is night three.

RRP: How were nights one and two?
BD: Nights one and two were really good. The energy in the room last night was better, so hopefully it will just keep getting better. You know, strangely, after Europe it feels like the crowd is more subdued, like the crowds in Europe know the new album [Boxer] a little better.

RRP: I'm just curious how it is right now for you guys? You feel like the European folks were already more in the zone with the new record?
BD: Yeah, we showed up in Berlin and they were singing along on those new songs. It was really great and surprising. We don't have the same kind of anthemic choruses that maybe Alligator had, but it felt like people still wanted to sing. Part of it, there was a lot of Irish in the room.

RRP: OK [laughs]. But anthemic aside, there are a lot of lyrical handles, I think. I would sing along when I was watching your shows, so I understand.
BD: I think that's really interesting with your shows, how some of the new songs have really — something like "Keep The Car Running," they tend to be even bigger now than the stuff from Funeral in terms of the stuff like the crowd swell.
RRP: The surprise one, well the one I was hoping for that totally turned out that way is "Ocean Of Noise." It turned into this song where people are so in the zone, like singing out to, like, the one line, or whatever.

BD: You know we have that song on our walk-in twice?
RRP: Are you serious? [laughs]
BD: Yeah, somebody actually pointed it out to us in an email message, like, "We love the song, but why is it on twice?" We were like, "Yeah, well, we like it a lot."

RRP: That's awesome. We went to this after-party and somebody was playing "Age Of Consent" by New Order, which we used to cover a long time ago.
BD: Wow, I've never heard you do that.
RRP: We're not very good at it. We did it at, like, the end of the Funeral tour when we were trying to keep ourselves from jumping off a bridge. We taught ourselves all of these cover songs, not practising them, just to keep you awake and excited, to not feel like you totally know what you're doing on stage.

BD: How does it work? Do you guys suggest something, or does Win [Butler] know a lot of songs that he loves?
RRP: For a while there was a running tab of songs we wanted to cover and, for a while, we had this plan to try and just go be a bar band. Like in New York or something like that, before the band got as popular as it is now. We were like, "Let's just go and get like a weekly gig and learn lots of cover songs," like the way The Who did it.

BD: Didn't the Stones start that way?
RRP: Yeah, the Stones, The Who, all those bands just played R&B songs.

BD: Did I tell you our Who anecdote yet?
RRP: No.

BD: Maybe you guys got asked to do the same thing. You're playing Roskilde this summer, right?
RRP: Yeah.

BD: So we got some message from Pete Townshend saying he wants to jam with us on stage.
RRP: Dude, that's amazing!

BD: Isn't that funny?
RRP: Are you gonna do it?

BD: Yeah, definitely. He wants a pass at two of our songs or he says we can do a Who song if we want, but we're thinking we want to hear him play "Mr. November" or something. To me, he's like a total hero.
RRP: Me too.
BD: I've heard he can be cranky because of his hearing, but anyway.
RRP: I'd be cranky if my ear was bleeding all the time.

BD: You guys have much experience with people like that getting up on stage with you. What is that like?
RRP: Um, it's happened twice, well three times, I guess. But sort of in a casual or off-the-cuff sort of style it happened twice.

BD: Well, the Bowie at Central Park was amazing.
RRP: That felt somewhat like an — well, both when we did that and the [David] Byrne thing, which was at Irving Plaza, they both felt somewhat like an out-of-body experience, in a subtle way, where you're aware. With the Bowie stuff, we didn't practise it or anything like that. So we were just like, "We know how to play 'Queen Bitch,' why don't you just jump on and we'll do it?" And we didn't know if he was going to show up or not until just before we played. Then it was like, "OK, well he's here, we'll do it as an encore or something." It was so strange. You could just feel this completely together stage presence, like someone who just knows how to be on stage.

BD: Yeah, when he walked out, the show had already been so elated and amazing, and then he just upped the ante when nothing else could. It was either him or, like, God showing up.
RRP: We just started playing "Queen Bitch." Win said, "Here's a David Bowie song," and Bowie bounded onto stage in his white suit and straw hat, and he's just got such a visual presence. He's like a visual stigma, or cultural stigma, like, David Bowie equals "this is an event." And with the David Byrne thing, I remember feeling when we started playing this weird feeling of not like an inflated sense of history, but "this is a weird historical moment for us." Not necessarily for anybody else, but for us, the Talking Heads are probably one of the only bands that everybody in our band claims a really big influence from. While we were playing, as well as being this really emotional, intense show — how do I explain this? — there was a sense of just being a person in time, very kind of ephemeral sense of yourself. People write music, they get older, and then they influence other people and those people make music and there's this continuum. You can't trace the whole thing, it's more like a web, a time-based web, and being really aware of that. Like, here we are playing with someone who we would never be playing in a band with. Something really out-of-body, but really wonderful also. You guys got to do the Bruce Springsteen thing, right?
BD: Yeah, well I guess we did actually get to play with him with 20 other people as well.

RRP: You got to play his songs, but with him standing right in front of you, right?
BD: Yeah, but luckily we prepared for it thinking he wouldn't show up. We did this tribute to the Nebraska album.

RRP: What songs did you play?
BD: We only played "Mansion On The Hill," but we did a really faithful version to his recording of it, which is actually really interesting because that whole thing was basically recorded as demos. He recorded it on some four-track thing, but to get the sound right he actually slowed down the recording slightly. So we transcribed his harmonica solo exactly for Padma [Newsome] playing violin, which is really beautiful. But figuring out what key it was in was really funny. It was right in between C and D Major or something. But he was already into the band, and then he really liked what we did with the song, and he especially liked what Matt [Berninger] said about the song in the interview on stage right after.

RRP: What did he say?
BD: The interviewer asked Matt what the song was about and Matt kind of identified with the idea of when you're a kid growing up and being the other — like, you're sitting in the car looking up at the mansion on the hill. [Radio host] John Schaefer was asking us if Bruce gave us any advice, and that actually became kind of a joke because Bruce actually gave us a lot of advice. But it's all pretty much irrelevant to us because Bruce has sold more tickets to one show than we've sold records. Maybe not quite, but you know. His whole
attitude and persona is so refreshing, being so down-to-earth and cool in a way that your band is as well. Even though things are happening, you know, keeping it real, basically, because people who actually work in the music business
are so rarely like that. But the people we hang out with have really great priorities, and so Bruce kind of personified that.

BD:I was thinking about you today, Richard, because we are in total promo exhaustion, and I'm thinking, "How do you guys survive it, like the interviews and the photo stuff?"
RRP: We've turned down probably 80 per cent of what came our way this time.

BD: It's just too much.
RRP: It's just too much and we're lucky enough to be in this position where we can turn stuff down and there's still stuff that comes up that's interesting. We're just so fortunate. If we did everything that came our way, we'd still be doing it. I can't remember where I read it, I think it was an interview with Brian Eno about his career post-Roxy Music. When he started doing the generative music stuff — which is where he was using a computer program where he doesn't actually make the music, he just starts it and it generates itself — he was like, "It's really exciting to me because it has the exact opposite effect. As a creator of rock music, it made me feel really, really small and how refreshing that view was." It's kind of nice.
BD: That was my post-9/11 musical reaction, like, "I don't want to play loud, I don't want to make big, big things. I want to play this little soft acoustic instrument really gently, you know?" The music that went into Clogs stuff early on, there was a lot of that gentle sort of lute stuff.

RRP: Was that Stick Music that came out of that?
BD: Yeah, Stick Music came out of there. Even some of the stuff that went into Lullaby For Sue and to a certain extent there may even be things in The National stuff, some of the quieter things. To perform those songs we turn inward to each other in a way. In the past we've gotten into a more epic live thing, but I think part of the challenge for us right now is balancing those two things against each other.

BD: I feel like the sound world of Neon Bible is grand in an amazing way. How did you develop the actual sound?
RRP: This is the first time where the sound of the place where we recorded it in just really took the thing to the next level, just in terms of what we're able to plan. But we were able to actually know that, "OK, I can do this and make things sound like this." It was this cool room and it's kind of out-of-control and, "Let's just try and hope that it turns out really well."

BD: The one thing we were attempting to do on this record was separate ourselves a little bit from the guitar riffing, having songs originate in that way. I think Neon Bible does that. There are certain songs — it's so elusive and difficult to create songs when you're writing rock songs that you can still work in that format, but are untraditional and surprising, so I think it's something your record does...

BD: It's been nice to be in one place for one week. It's not necessarily any less exhausting. It's actually really, really tiring.
RRP: Our theory is that it wouldn't be so exhausting if we could do three weeks somewhere.

BD: You guys did that series of five shows in three cities, though, right?
RRP: Yeah we did the New York thing, the Montreal thing and then the London thing. We were destroyed. We thought it would be this fun, easy, stay-at-home/play shows thing, but it was still good.

BD: It ended up that touring and opening for you guys was the perfect thing for us to be doing. It was the right amount of pressure to perform well, but also no pressure because everybody was there to see you guys. And then the audience
welcoming us in that way, I think we felt way more comfortable in these shows because of it.
RRP: Good, I'm glad. It felt like the perfect time because we got to play our shows and watch your shows. Now the record — it came out like two days ago or something?

BD: The record came out last week, actually, May 22. It's been great.
RRP: I saw the wicked review on Pitchfork.

BD: Yeah, pretty much all those surprisingly grumpy people actually like it.
RRP: Yeah, Rolling Stone loves it, too. You got a better review than us in Rolling Stone. It was a hilarious review. It was all about [drummer] Bryan [Devendorf].

BD: Yeah, we've started calling Bryan "The Name." Every review that mentions him, he becomes more of a drum diva. Not really, though. So far it's been really great. We will reunite.
RRP: It's gonna be July.

Special thanks to Matt Littlefair for coordinating this interview.

The following feature is from the July 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, go to the CHARTattack Shop.