Everything Now

Album: Everything Now (2017)
Charted: 50
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Songfacts®:

  • The title track of Everything Now, this was also the first song to be released from the record. Frontman Win Butler told BBC Radio 1's MistaJam about the song:

    "There's sort of an everything-nowness to life. I feel like almost every event and everything that happens surrounds you on all sides. Some of it is fake and some of it is real and some of it is trying to sell you something and some of it is profound. Every moment of everything refracts into a thousand different things. It's trying to capture some of the experiences of being alive now in all its flaws and all its glory.

    I remember being in a cafe once and I was overhearing this woman talking about watching The Sopranos and they had just finished watching The Sopranos, like they kind of binge-watched The Sopranos over a weekend. One of them was saying, 'Oh, it's so annoying that there's no more Sopranos. I guess I'm gonna have to find something else to watch.' This was maybe six years ago–five years ago and it just hit me that this thing that took ten years to make someone watched in a weekend and was annoyed there wasn't more. I was like whoa; I feel like culturally the moment and this kind of era that we've entered into of kind of everything-nowness has positive and negative sides to it but it's definitely a new way of being."
  • Arcade Fire are backed by the Harmonistic Praise Crusade, who are a New Orleans choir.
  • That's Patrick Bebey playing the pan flute. His part is based on the flute in "The Coffee Cola Song" by his father, the late Cameroonian artist Francis Bebey.
  • The song was produced by Arcade Fire along with Steve Mackey, who is best known for playing bass guitar in the band Pulp and Thomas Bangalter, whose day job is one half of the French house music duo Daft Punk. Bangalter also played synthesizer on the track.
  • The song is accompanied by a video, which shows Arcade Fire performing in a barren town while wearing matching "Everything Now" jackets. The clip was directed by the Sacred Egg, who also shot Royal Blood's "Lights Out" clip.
  • Arcade Fire achieved their first ever #1 on a US Billboard chart when this song climbed to the summit of the Adult Alternative Songs airplay listing dated July 29, 2017. The Canadian band's previous best ranking on a US chart had been "Reflektor," which peaked at #11 again on Adult Alternative Songs.
  • The song was sort of an accident. Win Butler admitted to Dutch website 3voor12 that he was working on a remix of "The Coffee Cola Song" and he "just ended up writing a completely different song around it without even thinking about it."

    Butler continued: "It kind of took a couple of months to realise that 'Everything Now' was a song because we're not really a band that uses sampling or anything like that, so it wasn't something that was on my radar. By the time we played it with the band, it took on a completely different life of its own."

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