Arcade Fire chats rock, The Clash & Yeats

The epic poems of William Butler Yeats are rarely invoked by rock musicians as an artistic template, but Arcade Fire’s William Pierce Butler is a happy exception.

“Rock ‘n’ roll is still extremely young as an art-form and recorded music is essentially in its infancy, so it’s hard to tell what the future holds for our band. But, in the poetry world, Yeats got better and better as he got older, which is rare,” Butler said of his partial Irish namesake, who died in 1939.

“Most artists, most creative people, flame out in their twenties. But Yeats kept improving as he got older.”

Butler, 31, hopes Arcade Fire will follow in Yeats’ footsteps, qualitatively speaking, rather than crash and burn.

Yet, had this acclaimed Canadian-American band not become one of the biggest and most ambitious indie-rock acts of the past decade, Butler might now be working in the same field Yeats once did. Or, perhaps, he’d be an Eastern European language professor, as befits a 2005 Northwestern University grad who majored in poetry and Slavic languages.

“What was my goal at the time? I figured I would figure it out!” the California-born, Texas-raised Butler said by phone from his home in Montreal. “Then the band happened, which was pretty fortuitous. I didn’t have to figure it out.”

Now on tour in support of its fourth and most recent album, last year’s “Reflektor,” Arcade Fire performs here Tuesday at Chula Vista’s nearly 20,000-capacity Sleep Train Amphitheatre (ticket information appears at the conclusion of this article). It’s the biggest area show yet for the Canadian-American band, which was co-founded in 2001 by Butler’s older brother, Win, and won the 2011 Grammy Award for Album of the Year by unexpectedly beating out the heavily favored Lady Gaga and Eminem.

More recently, William Butler this year shared an Academy Award nomination for Original Score for “Her,” which was directed by Spike Jonze. The film’s music was performed primarily by Arcade Fire and co-written by Butler and band collaborator Owen Pallett (who performs here Sept. 14 at the Casbah).

“(‘Her’) really expanded my brain and ability to compromise,” Butler said. “It made me feel more like Hillary Clinton (as Secretary of State) than a musician, but in a good way. It was (a lot of) navigating between the band and Spike, and making music in service of the film. It’s a very different enterprise than just playng music or making your own music. It was very different from what I’d done before.”

Asked if music means more to him than it used to, Butler replied: “I feel like a musician now, which is something new for me.”

Intriguingly, his self-reappraisal isn’t because of the subtle score he co-wrote for “Her.” Rather, he said, it’s because of Phi Slamma Jamma, a two-year-old cover band that teams Butler with several other Arcade Fire members.

“We do songs by Devo, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Flying Burrito Brothers, The Byrds, all over the board,” he said. “Playing other people’s music changed (things) for me, not that I haven’t played other people’s music before.”

In a 2003 U-T San Diego interview, former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones happily noted that -- unlike Zep singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page -- he could go out in public whenever he wanted, simply because very few fans recognized him off stage.

Does the same hold true for Butler?

“Yeah, very much so,” he replied. “Life is very easy. I mean Win and (his wife, Arcade Fire multi-instrumentalist and singer) Régine (Chassagne) get recognized quite a lot, as they sing and are often together (on stage). So, when you see them, together (off-stage), you’re pretty sure it’s them. And (fellow Arcade Fire member) Richie (Reed Parry) gets recognized.

“But I can basically go anywhere. I can walk through a festival crowd, the day we’re headlining. And if people people stop me for a photo, it’s to take a photo of them and their friends. That happened at Coachella the first time we played there and at Glastonbury (in England) this year.”

While some fans regard Arcade Fire as an all-Canadian band, the Butler Brothers were born in the California town of Truckee. They grew up mostly in suburb of Houston.

“Me and Win’s mom is a musician,” Butler said. “She and a couple of musician friends would play with Will LeBlanc, who was kind of a Cajun Texas guy... so we got a little bit of Cajun stuff and a little rock and blues stuff. There was a crawfish festival in the spring, but it was not a super vibrant (music) scene.”

As teenagers, Butler and his brother attended a New England boarding school. It proved to be a pivotal time.

“I’ve always played music my whole life, just because it’s in my family. But I was exposed to more popular and exciting music going to boarding school,” he recalled.

“Music was always part of the landscape and I was always fairly talented at it, without working too hard. So it was always a part of my life. I’d been playing mostly piano, growing up. Then I played clarinet in the junior high band. And music is my mom’s career and her family’s career, gong back a couple of generations. So there was no switch onto a musical track for me; it was very present the whole time. I didn’t study music in high school or college. It was just part of my life. But it was a very important, fundamental part, as important as food.”

There have been a number of siblings in famous rock bands, from the Wilson brothers in the Beach Boys and the often feuding Davies brothers in The Kinks to Duane and Gregg Allman and the notoriously combative Noel and Liam Gallagher in the (for now) now-defunct Oasis.

Butler is quick to note that he and older bro Win get along much better than the Gallagher and Davies siblings.

“We’ve always had a fairly civilized relationship,” he said. “We would bicker as kids. But ever since Win and I both went to boarding school so when Win was 15 and moved out of the house, we became better friends. And we’ve been reasonably good friends ever since, because we know where the other is coming from, we have shared experiences and a lot of the same fundamental world views, so we can relate to each other.

“We fundamentally know the other person. If there’s a lack of communication, we still get the fundamental direction that the other person is going.”

At its best, Arcade Fire’s current album, “Reflektor,” balances the band’s epic rock approach, a la such acknowledged influences as U2 and Bruce Springsteen, with kinetic dance grooves. But those grooves owe less to LCD Soundsystem alum James Murphy, who helped produce “Reflektor,” than to Talking Heads, circa that band’s classic 1980 album, “Remain in Light.”

The Talking Heads-like vibe was reinforced by Arcade Fire’s often electrifying performance in April at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio. There, the band delivered one rhythmically propulsive song after another, building up wave after wave of musical tension and release. Butler also cites Talking Heads’ visionary 1984 concert film, “Stop Making Sense,” as an inspiration for how bands can maintain their integrity and independence while embracing the concept of putting on a big show for its audience.

To hear Butler tell it, though, he and his Arcade Fire colleagues were more inspired on “Reflektor” by two other bands from roughly the same era as Talking Heads -- New Order and The Clash -- whose 1980 triple-album, “Sandinista!” was especially influential.

“There’s not a note of it on this record, but our deepest, deepest dance influence, collectively as a band, is New Order,” he said. “But we weren’t trying to ape New Order; we were going for something a little more lively, just in terms of live music, instead of (electronically) sequenced music.

“But I’m trying to think what our specific album touchstones were (for ‘Reflektor’). There was kind of an attitude of ‘Sandinista!’ and being expansive and not being scared to go a little stupid over the source of the record, and, certainly, how ‘Sandinista!’ swings from cover songs to reggae and places in between. Our record isn’t quiet as crazy as ‘Sandinista!’ But it was kind of like that. And there was definitely a lot of talk about ‘Remain in Light and the scope of that album, because it’s so short and so focused.

“It was like: ‘Do we want to make ‘Remain in Light?’ Or do we want to make ‘Sandinista!’? And we wanted to make ‘Sandinista!’ ”

As for Arcade Fire’s present and immediate future, Butler is pleased with the band’s evolution.

“In general, I like how our technical side as a band has progressed,” he said. “Like, we’re technically able to make the sounds we want to sound like and technically able to achieve things. And, at the same time, we’re not too technically competent. It hasn’t got to the point where the music is lost for the technique. But I like that, in the studio now, we know our way around more and can afford to do things, like if we need to hire someone or get specific gear for a reason, we can do that. That side is really great

“Mostly, on every level, we want to maintain our nimbleness. We don’t want to turn in to a cruise ship, where we start something and there’s no way we can control it. We want to stop, ideally, the boat, without it consuming out lives, which is hard when we have a lot more infrastructure now. We try to keep close control of the music side, the show side and the business side.”

In many cities on its current tour, Arcade Fire is performing a song by a band or solo artist from that city. In St. Louis, it was a Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.” In Philadelphia, it was Boyz II Men’s “Motown Philly.” (“That song was so foreign to us,” Butler noted with a wry chuckle.)

But he isn’t certain yet if Arcade Fire will perform a song by a San Diego artist at its Sleep Train Amphitheatre show.

“I’ll have to do some Googling,” he said. “The song depends a bit on the mood. Sometimes, you want to do something on the stupider side; sometimes, something really genuine and heartfelt; and, sometimes, just something fun.”

When punk-rock pioneer Patti Smith and her band performed in San Diego in 2012 at House of Blues, they took great relish in blasting out Iron Butterfly’s heady thud-rock classic, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” (Smith and her band did their homework: Few people beyond San Diego realize Iron Butterfly started here before moving to Los Angeles and landing a record deal.)

Will the fact that Smith covered “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” here deter Arcade Fire from getting their psychedelic groove on and doing the same number Tuesday at Sleep Train?

Butler laughed. “No, he said. “It certainly wont prevent us!”

Arcade Fire, with Spoon and Dan Deacon

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Sleep Train Amphitheatre, 2050 Entertainment Circle, Chula Vista

Tickets: $30.50-$70.50 (plus service charges)

Phone: (800) 745-3000

Online: livenation.com