Arcade Fire life and biography

Arcade Fire is an canadian music band with a lot of members: the husband and wife duo of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, along with Will Butler, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury, Jeremy Gara, and Sarah Neufeld.

The initial Montreal structure of the band began to dissolve in the summer of 2002, when they travelled to Butler's family ranch in Maine to record their self-titled EP. Tension between Butler and Broscoe led the latter to exit the band following the recording session. Richard Reed Parry, who had been enlisted to help the band record, began to collaborate with them during the sessions and would go on to join the band shortly afterwards. In the winter of 2003, the band celebrated the release of its EP with a show at Montreal's Casa del Popolo. Before a crowd packed beyond capacity, the band's set ended (in the middle of an encore) with an argument between Butler and Reed, who quit the band on-stage. Mills told gathered friends in the crowd immediately thereafter that he considered the band to have broken up, as such resigning from the band as well. Following the on-stage implosion, Win's brother William Butler (subject of the early Arcade Fire song "William Pierce Butler") and Tim Kingsbury were brought in to replace Reed and Mills so that the band could continue, and they set out to promote the self-titled EP. The eponymous release (often referred to by fans as the Us Kids Know EP) was sold at early shows. After the band achieved fame, the EP was subsequently remastered and given a full release.

The promise shown by the new band in its early live shows allowed them to land a record contract with the independent record label, Merge Records, before the end of its first year together.

When asked about the rumour that the band's name refers to a fire in an arcade, Win Butler replied: "It's not a rumour, it's based on a story that someone told me. It's not an actual event, but one that I took to be real. I would say that it's probably something that the kid made up, but at the time I believed him."

Funeral was released in September 2004 in Canada and February 2005 in Great Britain. The title of the debut album referred to the deaths of several relatives of band members during its recording. These events created a somber atmosphere that influenced songs such as "Une année sans lumière" ("A Year Without Light"), "In the Backseat", and "Haïti", Chassagne's elegy to her lost homeland.

The band booked small clubs for their 2004 tour, but growing interest forced many venue changes, far beyond the band's expectations, and the tour continued into mid-2005 throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, the SummerSonic Festival in Japan, and the Hillside Festival in Guelph. Taking much of the summer of 2005 off, the band made key festival appearances at the Halifax Pop Explosion, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the Sasquatch! Music Festival, Lollapalooza, Reading and Leeds Festival in the UK, Electric Picnic in Ireland and the Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands.

During the downtime between Funeral and the beginning of recording sessions for Neon Bible, the band purchased a defunct church in the small Quebec town of Farnham, approximately 70 kilometres (43 mi) southeast of Montreal, and spent the early part of 2006 converting it into a recording studio.

The first track officially released from Neon Bible was "Intervention" in December 2006 on iTunes. Proceeds from this release were dedicated to Partners in Health. An error resulted in a second song, "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations", appearing on iTunes for a short time. The album was leaked to peer-to-peer networks on January 26, 2007, and was officially released March 5, 2007 in the UK and March 6 in North America.

In February 2008, Win Butler announced on the band's journal that the Neon Bible tour had come to an end, after one year of touring and a total of 122 shows (including 33 festivals) in 75 cities and 19 countries.

On May 27, 2010 it was announced that a new double-sided 12" single would be released the same day, with the full album, called The Suburbs, to be released on August 2 in the UK and on August 3 in the U.S. and Canada thanks to Merge Records. The album is produced by Markus Dravs, who worked on previous album, 2007's Neon Bible and was engineered by Marcus Paquin, who has also previously worked with the band. A track-by-track review ahead of The Suburbs release by The Quietus website said, "The progression is similar to the one William Blake takes us through in Songs of Innocence and of Experience that suggests forward momentum and maturity." The album was released with eight different covers.

Arcade Fire has won numerous awards, including the 2011 Grammy for Album of the Year, the 2011 Juno Award for Album of the Year, and the 2011 Brit Award for Best International Album for their third studio album, The Suburbs, released in 2010 to critical acclaim and commercial success.

In earlier years they won the 2008 Meteor Music Award for Best International Album and the 2008 Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year for their second studio album, Neon Bible. They also received nominations for the Best Alternative Music Album Grammy for all three of their studio albums. The band's work has also been twice named as a short list nominee for the Polaris Music Prize in 2007 for Neon Bible and in 2011 for The Suburbs, winning the award for The Suburbs.

Arcade Fire also recorded a song for The Hunger Games soundtrack (The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond), called "Abraham's Daughter". The soundtrack is set to be released on March 20, 2012.

Discography:
-Funeral (2004)
-Neon Bible (2007)
-The Suburbs (2010)

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