Read All About It - Hear All About It: Arcade Fire Will Butler Writes First Guardian News Story Song - Listen

Arcade Fire's Will Butler has this week embarked on a week of turning news stories into songs. Every day he will write and record one song based on that day's news story in The Guardian.

In an interview with the newspaper, Butler commented: "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."

The songs will all appear on The Guardian‘s website, and kicked off today with 'Clean Monday', a song about the Greek debt crisis. Listen to the track below.



Says Butler: "I’m rooting for Greece. I mean, broadly, who the hell isn’t rooting for Greece? Even if you’re super right wing, or super German, or super capitalist you probably don’t want Greece tumbling out of the Euro and defaulting on its debts. But beyond that, I like that they’re a young government. I like Yanis Varoufakis, the new finance minister. To a certain extent, I’ve bought into the media portrayal of him (from The Guardian and NPR and all over) as a straight shooting rapscallion who might - just might - be crazy enough to, um, responsibly manage the Greek financial situation? 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 / 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. And 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 debut solo album, 'Policy', is out on March 10 via Merge.