Will Butler has one of those brains that turns every answer into a choose-your-own-adventure book. Ask him why he wrote a solo album about American history, and you’ll wind up time-traveling from George Washington’s teeth to Mormon desert musicians to his wife organizing Arizona statehouse races.
“I don’t know anything,” Butler says cheerfully. “That’s the whole record.”
Generations, his second solo LP, might be the catchiest existential crisis released in recent memory. It’s an indie-rock dance party scored by a man trying to figure out what the hell is going on in America — and what to do about it.
“All the lyrics are: I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to think about this. Oh god, I have to think about this,” he explains. “But the music is in tension with that. It’s communal. It’s embodied. It’s like: okay, maybe I don’t have answers, but I’m showing up.”
Butler’s always had one foot in the thinking person’s panic room, whether with Arcade Fire or in his solo work. But Generations is something else — a reckoning with ancestry, whiteness, systems of power, and how personal success is often born from decisions made centuries ago.
“Being a musician in my family goes back to the 1880s,” he says. “My great-grandpa was a poor Mormon kid who decided to be a musician. That led to my grandpa, Alvino Rey, becoming one of the first electric guitar players — a white dude, playing Hawaiian guitar jazz under a fake name. I mean… that’s a little thorny, right?”
He’s quick to clarify: it’s not about guilt, per se. “It’s about recognizing how many other decisions — not just in my family — date back to the 19th century and shape everything now. My life is shaped by those choices. So how do I deal with that?”
Generations tries to deal with it by dancing through the discomfort. Lead single “Surrender” is all jittery handclaps and theatrical call-and-response, but lyrically it’s wrestling with, well, everything. “I’m ranting,” Butler says, “but I’m not alone. The voices on the record are saying, ‘Keep ranting if you need to — and then let’s figure out what’s next.’”
He traces this approach back to Motown, to high school theater, to Smokey Robinson’s gang of humans in harmony. “I can’t write a song that’s just one voice,” he says. “It doesn’t feel human unless there are other people in the room.”
That culminates in the final track “Fine,” a not-so-fine dissection of American history that sounds like Schoolhouse Rock gone full Randy Newman. “It starts with George Washington and a slave and a coat,” Butler says. “And then it keeps going. It's got that early Kanye spirit — trying to do everything, kind of being an idiot, but laying it all out.”
Elsewhere, on “Not Gonna Die,” he confronts racial paranoia head-on. “When we name our fears, we make them real,” he says, recalling the time neighbors told him two of the 9/11 bombers had once lived in his (predominantly Bangladeshi Muslim) neighborhood. “It was completely false. But people still say it. Like, stop telling me to be afraid of everyone who doesn’t look like me.”
Generations might sound like a side project, but Butler insists this one’s different. “Policy was more like scattering bread on the waters,” he says of his 2015 solo debut. “With Generations, I thought about what I wanted to say. It’s more cohesive. It’s real.”
He credits his band — especially drummer Miles and sister-in-law Julie — for helping shape that vision. “We jammed a lot. ‘Promised’ was just a groove we played over and over. I had no lyrics. Just: this feels good, we’re keeping it.”
There’s even a Broadway play in the works. Butler wrote music for Stereophonic, a play by David Adjmi about a fictional band in the studio. “It’s not a musical — the songs are just what they’re working on in the play,” he explains. “It really nails the pressure and madness of making a record. It’s inspiring.”
And yes, Arcade Fire is working on something too. “We always tour until we’re sick, then take a long time off,” Butler laughs. “But the schedule’s not busted yet. We’re making the record differently, but it’s happening. Once we can all get together again, it’ll probably move fast. Unless it doesn’t. It’s like trying to catch a wild horse on the plains. You could get a broken leg — or a great record.”
Whatever comes next, Generations feels like a moment. Not a full-stop declaration, but a notebook scrawled in all caps: I’M THINKING ABOUT IT. I'M NOT OKAY WITH THIS. I’M HERE. LET’S TALK.
And in a time when everyone’s screaming for certainty, maybe that’s what we needed most: a catchy, communal, theatrical shrug.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
