Most Northwestern graduates don’t go on to record the number one album in America, but Will Butler’s career took a slightly different trajectory from that of your average poetry major.
Butler (Weinberg ‘05) is the manically energetic multi-instrumentalist for the rock band Arcade Fire, which has slowly grown into one of the most popular modern independent rock bands. The band is also an ardent supporter of Dr. Paul Farmer’s work with Partners in Health, which provides efficient and effective community health care to Haiti.
Butler returned to his alma mater Tuesday. The young musician delivered a keynote lecture as part of the Center for Civic Engagement’s weeklong conference bringing Northwestern alumni to discuss citizenship. After the lecture, Butler was surprised that so many students braved the cold on a Tuesday night to hear him talk. “It was great,” he said, “because I remember not doing anything in college.”
It was an understatement. At Northwestern he studied poetry and Slavic culture, served as editor of Helicon and played with Arcade Fire on their rise to prominence.
Butler remembers the challenge of convincing his academic advisor about the wisdom of spending six months performing and recording with the band at their headquarters in Montreal with his brother, Win. “He looked deep into my eyes, saw I wasn’t a crazy person, and called up my parents to tell them it wasn’t that bad an idea,” he said. “Maybe in Montreal I’d pick up some French or some people skills or something.”
After recording what would become Funeral with the band in the spring and summer of 2003, Butler returned to Northwestern his junior year. “I could stay in Montreal and keep trucking with the band, which is annoying from the whole ‘getting a degree’ point,” he said. “I knew I wanted a degree, and the Slavic Studies Department is pretty extraordinary, with lots of people who are intelligent and idiosyncratic.”
Even while studying, though, Butler couldn’t avoid working with the band. “I helped with logistics, talked general strategy,” he said. “I decided which devils we should pay homage to, and which devils we should not worship.”
But Butler’s academic interests occasionally outweighed his musical obligations. The summer between his junior and senior year, instead of touring with Arcade Fire and The Unicorns, Butler won an undergraduate research grant. “Northwestern paid me to study Czech rock ‘n’ roll of the 1980s,” he said. “And a man’s got to expand his mind. The trick with grants is that all the hoopla’s up front. Once they trust you, you can do whatever you want. At the end of the Czech rock ‘n’ roll thing, I had to write like a page and a half.”
It all started to come together by Butler’s senior year. Funeral dropped in the fall of 2004 to widespread critical acclaim. Butler remembered sitting at home having to upgrade Arcade Fire’s Web capacity after hearing from Win that Pitchfork put up a review of their album. “And back in that day, high reviews meant something, damn it,” he said.
An exceptionally satisfying senior year followed for Butler, who spent his time trading off between working on his collection of poems for his poetry major while ditching a select number of classes to play shows with the band in important cities. “I knew the system at that point, so I had a jolly old time.” Butler remembered spending his senior year “finagling my professors, asking ‘can I skip class to go on Conan O’Brien?’ I was writing my independent study with Mark Sheldon, and it was all pretty satisfying.”
Although Northwestern is notorious for its limited musical opportunities for non-music majors, Butler made do with what he had. He spent hours at the pianos in Shepard Residential College, where he lived. “The only thing that made me better was playing in a room without anybody yelling at me,” he said. He also played in the student band Citizens on Patrol, which was featured in Niteskool’s 2005 music video — one he said cost more than Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies)” video.
But for Butler, the most important aspect of his time at Northwestern was the liberal arts education he received. “I think a liberal arts education lays the groundwork for doing what you want to do,” he said. “An experimental method of learning makes you want to experiment with the world.”