Listen to Will Butler’s New Song, ‘Clean Monday,’ Written After Reading the News
As we learned late last week, Arcade Fire's Will Butler -- who will soon release his debut solo LP -- planned to write and share a new song each day this week based on a particular story in The Guardian. Well, he's held true to his word and has released the first song of the week, titled "Clean Monday," via The Guardian. You can listen to the Greek debt crisis-inspired song below.
The project, which was partly influenced by Bob Dylan, will continue to find the multi-instrumentalist browsing the news each day to find a story that leads him to write a song. When looking for content, Butler says he will search for everything from international drama in politics to failed scientific developments.
For this song in particular, Butler says, "I was reading The Guardian's live coverage of the forthcoming Greek proposals of how they’re going to pay off their debts, when a little blurb popped up explaining that the Greek markets were closed today because it was Clean Monday – the Greek Orthodox equivalent of Ash Wednesday. It was an amazing [and] hilarious (well, maybe mildly amusing) coincidence to me that the Greek ministers were scrambling and figuring out how to avoid strict austerity on the day that Lent starts."
He then went on to express how he's rooting for Greece in the end, stating, "All this scrambling is just to figure out the next few months. It’s gonna be a long winter, and a long spring, and maybe a really long summer for Greece. But my fingers are crossed."
Butler's new solo album Policy is due out on March 16 via Merge Records.