Will Butler to write songs based on Guardian news stories

23 February 2015, 12:10 | Written by Jessica Goodman

(News)

(Will Butler)

In the run-up to his debut solo album, founding Arcade Fire member Will Butler has announced he's going to write songs based on news stories published in The Guardian.

Will Butler will be tackling a different headline from the UK broadsheet newspaper every weekday this week (23-27 February), with each track being posted to The Guardian website.

Speaking of the project, Butler cited Bob Dylan as his inspiration: "It would be a song he wrote in two weeks or something, such as ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, which is one of the greatest songs ever. So I’ve set myself an impossible bar.”

He went on to discuss the morality of using some of these breaking stories for inspiration: “It’s a cruel thing, but sometimes you read something and think, ‘Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that.’ Something like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn trial – my God, that’s the gnarliest story in the world, but it’s interesting. Or you might read a science headline and think, ‘The universe is so much bigger than I thought it was.’ There’s something really beautiful in that.”

Debut solo album Policy is set for release on 9 March.

Watch Butler's clip for latest single "Anna" below.