Riding the tide

The sudden noise from beneath the floorboard of Win Butler’s green-and-white GMC van sounds so violent as he speeds down Highway 101 that something feels seriously wrong.

“Don’t worry,” says the founder of Arcade Fire, the superb band that’s the new favorite of rock tastemakers. “We’re just out of gas.”

Then why is the van shaking so alarmingly and the gas gauge showing plenty of fuel?

“Oh, don’t go by that,” Butler responds. “There’s something wrong with the needle, so we run out of gas a lot.”

The van makes it just far enough on this rural stretch north of Paso Robles for Butler, 24, to spot a gas station a few hundred yards from an offramp. He jumps out and pushes the vehicle down a steep ramp, and it quickly picks up speed.

This leaves him with a big decision: Does he obey the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp and lose all the van’s momentum? Or does he roll through it, even though an overpass is blocking his view of oncoming traffic?

Running the stop sign would be tempting fate for a group whose debut CD is titled “Funeral” and dedicated to the memory of relatives who died around the time the album was recorded.

Without hesitation, Butler jumps back in the van, presses vigorously on the horn and zips past the stop sign, easily making the station.

As his bandmate and wife, Regine Chassagne, heads inside for coffee, the 6-foot-5 Butler stares back at the highway. “We had even more problems with the gauge on the school bus we used to tour in,” he says. “We once ran out of gas right at the entrance to the busiest intersection in Toronto. It was such a mess that it made the TV news.”

Butler got so frustrated with the bus he sold it for $200, which he considers a good deal even though the check bounced. “At least they towed it away. That was good enough for me.”

No gas gauge. No tour manager. No manager at all.

Is this really the way life is for a band whose debut album was called one of the 10 best of 2004 by critics coast to coast, from The Los Angeles Times to the New Yorker?

With all their potential, the members of Arcade Fire, whose album was released by North Carolina indie Merge Records, could switch to a life of relative luxury overnight by signing with a major record label.

Ever since their CD started an industry buzz last fall, thanks in part to endorsements on such influential Internet sites as Pitchforkmedia.com, the band has been besieged by record company representatives, each promising creative control and visions of gold albums.

But Butler and Chassagne worry about the price of such a move in an industry where the chief thing that seems to matter is sales. They’ve heard enough horror stories about the creative compromises that usually come with those seven-figure advances.

Unlike past decades when major labels would frequently stick with a promising artist for several albums, hoping for an eventual breakthrough, labels now tend to lose interest or even drop artists if they don’t deliver hits quickly.

“If an artist’s goal is to play the halftime show at the national championship football game, then you need to be with a major label because they are plugged into that whole corporate system,” says T Bone Burnett, the respected songwriter-producer whose new Sony-affiliated label, DMZ, aims to provide an artist-oriented environment within a major-label framework.

“If you want to make challenging, innovative music on your own terms, a major label might not be a good place for you because record companies are only in one business anymore: breaking artists through large-scale media events.”

As the van heads back down the 101, Butler says he doesn’t see the debate over major-versus-indie labels as a moral one. It’s more a case of which one is best for the band.

“I think the White Stripes and Rufus Wainwright have managed to get good enough deals so they operate with pretty much the freedom they’d have on an indie label,” he says. “But I’d say there are many, many more examples of the opposite, where people have lost control of their music. And that’s our biggest nightmare.”

DOWN-TO-EARTH COUPLE

Young rock musicians talk so often about the pressures and angst of their world that it’s refreshing to spend time with a couple who are so happily down to earth, making music they love and getting hailed for it. They had never toured outside of Canada before “Funeral” was released four months ago, and now their reps are talking to David Letterman and Conan O’Brien.

On a stop just south of Monterey, they play tourist, stepping gleefully along rocks on the beach, and then hold hands during a stroll in Carmel. They’re so new at the whole media game that they still have to pause when questions are asked. They don’t have sound bites ready.

In the car as they head to Los Angeles for a final few days of vacation before starting the second leg of their tour, they repeatedly press the scan button on the radio, in hopes of finding some vintage pop tune, but the reception is poor.

When they can’t find anything good, the pixieish, free-spirited Chassagne, 28, who co-writes the group’s songs and sings on some tracks, pounds furiously on her legs and arms, playing some of the music in her head.

She reacts with a true fan’s delight when she finds a good song, singing along loudly with Phil Spector’s teen masterpiece “Be My Baby” or trying to match Mick Jagger’s falsetto breaks on the Rolling Stones’ disco-edged “Miss You.”

“I never thought much about being a musician as a kid, even though there was so much musical history in my family,” says Butler, the grandson of bandleader and TV personality Alvino Rey. “I think I just took it for granted a bit. I’d come home and my mom would be playing Debussy on the harp, and other kids would go, ‘Wow,’ and I’d just go like, ‘Mom, can you stop?’ ”

Butler was born in Truckee and raised in the Houston area, but he didn’t get really hooked by music until he went away to high school in New Hampshire and met a friend who introduced him to records by such emotional rock acts as the Cure, the Smiths and Radiohead.

“It was like they weren’t just making a record, they were trying to express something important to them, something they had discovered or were searching their way through,” he recalls. “I started writing songs right away, not just here and there, but virtually all day.”

Butler studied fine arts for a year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York before following a musician friend to Montreal about five years ago. He was trying to put a band together when he met Chassagne, whose parents are from Haiti and who spoke mostly French at the time. She was singing jazz and playing recorder in what she describes as a sort of pre-Renaissance medieval band. Butler fell in love with her and her music.

The group’s name came from a story Butler heard as a child, and he likes that fans are divided between calling the band Arcade Fire and the Arcade Fire. “I kinda like both,” he says with a smile. “It sounds best to say the Arcade Fire, but just Arcade Fire looks better on the album cover.”

This edition of the group started in 2003 and also consists of Richard Parry, Tim Kingsbury and Win’s brother, Will, who each play a variety of instruments, plus violinist Sarah Neufeld. They recorded “Funeral” last year for less than $10,000 in Montreal, just hoping to get their investment back so they could record a second album. The album’s sales are now around 60,000 and growing fast.

The songs and arrangements are both enchanting.

The music -- sometimes delicate as snowflakes, other times epic and operatic -- is expressed through an often exotic mixture of instruments, some as familiar as guitars and drums, others as unexpected as accordions and xylophones. Butler often brings an urgency to the music, with vocals that carry the feverish exclamation of David Byrne.

While some of the songs have the arty sophistication of Talking Heads or the sensual exclamation of the Pixies, the overall effect is so blissfully fresh that it’s like tapping into someone’s private world.

The remarkable thing about their music is its blend of sweet, open-armed idealism and anxiety -- as individuals struggle to maintain or regain their faith and hope, no matter how painful the loss of a loved one or how helpless they feel. In one song, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” snow buries a town, but two lovers find a way to reach each other by digging a tunnel from one bedroom window to another. In other songs, there are expressions of spiritual quest and the times when the simple comfort of another’s arms is all that one needs.

In the guitar-driven “Wake Up,” the CD’s most dynamic track, Butler declares: “Somethin’ filled up my heart with nothin’, someone told me not to cry. But now that I’m older, my heart’s colder and I can see that’s a lie.”

“I do hope people are uplifted by the songs, but I don’t think I consciously tried to put a message in any of them,” Butler says during a lunch stop in Carmel. “I never mean it in a feely, touchy way, either. You have to do your part to make things happen in life. I don’t want the music to be naive.

“It’s easy to look at the album’s title and some of the songs and think we sat down and came up with this interesting concept, but we didn’t recognize the influence of all these deaths around us until afterward. When we started listening to the album afterward, though, it was clear that this played a part in what we were doing.”

They didn’t have any grand plan for finding a label, either. They landed on Merge because one of the band members knew the label’s owner and sent him demos.

Back in the van, however, the pair are reminded that their world is changing. Answering his cellphone, Butler hears that a top Los Angeles manager is hoping to meet with the band.

‘INCREDIBLY GROUNDED’

Pressure from the pop establishment on a promising new band can be enormous once it starts creating a buzz on an indie label.

“When anything happens this quickly for a band, there is this protective instinct in me that makes me get worried,” says David Viecelli, president of the band’s booking agency. “There are so many opportunities to screw everything up by doing the wrong thing with the wrong people too fast.

“The single most remarkable thing about this band in many respects -- beyond the music and everything that they create -- is how singularly reasonable, cautious, intelligent and incredibly grounded they are. They know who they are and what they want.”

Butler and Chassagne acknowledge the lure of a major label.

“There are also times when you wish we had the unlimited resources that you could have on a major label,” Butler says. “I don’t think U2 could have made ‘The Joshua Tree’ without being on a major label and being able to have all the time they wanted in the studio and work with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.

“Even though the songs would be great stripped down and acoustic, there is something amazing about what they created in the studio. I also envy how the Beatles had George Martin coming up with all these string arrangements for them and how Bob Dylan could afford the best session players on ‘Blonde on Blonde.’ ”

Chassagne, who like her husband played multiple instruments on “Funeral,” says she’s happy with the way their album turned out but wishes at times they had a few more options. “Like you might want a horn section on a certain track, but it’s too expensive. Or you want to do something over again, but that’ll cost another $50 in studio time.”

Butler knows his next step: Stick with Merge, which was started 15 years ago by Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, members of the rock group Superchunk, for releasing their own music and to serve as a low-key, artist-friendly label for others, including Spoon, Lambchop and, until recently, the Magnetic Fields.

“It’d be stupid not to stay with Merge,” Butler adds. “Everything feels so natural so far. It’s like we are happily married so there’s no reason to check out the other ladies.”

Nearing Salinas, Chassagne picks up a handsome diary-notebook, the kind songwriters often use to keep potential lyrics. Asked if she indeed is jotting down an idea, she smiles.

“I wish,” she says, opening the book to reveal a series of numbers. “It’s where I keep track of our T-shirt orders.”

On the page, she’s written 300 men’s medium shirts, 200 large, 150 extra large and so forth.

Within minutes, she’s on the cellphone placing an order that can be shipped to San Francisco in time for the start of the tour, which includes two sold-out shows tonight at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Soon after, Butler’s cell rings. It’s the credit card company informing him the order exceeds his card limit. He asks about putting the excess on his wife’s card, but her limit is even lower.

Several calls later, Butler has worked everything out and the T-shirts will be headed to San Francisco as planned.

As the lights of Los Angeles come into view, Butler starts talking about what to do on the final days of their vacation.

Will rock’s heralded new duo check out Universal Studios or Disneyland or the Walt Disney Concert Hall?

“You know what, Regine,” he says. “I was thinking I’d book us a rehearsal hall for a day. I kinda miss playing music.”

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On the Web

To hear samples from Arcade Fire’s “Funeral,” visit calendarlive.com/arcade.

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Robert Hilburn, pop music critic for The Times, can be reached at Robert.Hilburn@latimes.com