You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Arcade Fire is a Grammy-winning six-piece band originally from Montreal.
They've released five albums, and the last three have all debuted at number one on the charts.
In this episode,
singer Winn Butler takes apart Put Your Money on Me from their 2017 album Everything Now.
The story of the song began when Wynn and his wife and bandmate,
Regine Chassang, moved to New Orleans.
I'm Wynn Butler.
I play in Arcade Fire.
We built a new studio in New Orleans,
which I've kind of begun to recognize as part of the process of making a record.
We always end up kind of putting a new studio together, and somehow in making the space,
there's this kind of period where you're just plugging things in and seeing how they work,
and you accidentally end up writing a bunch of music.
And so the beginning of the song was around when I first got an 808 drum machine and was just kind of plugging it in and just got really excited about how it was sounding.
We did a tour where we played these small venues and played all new material.
And then I would usually DJ after.
And I just had so much fun.