How a former Arcade Fire member helped create the sound of 'Stereophonic'

The assignment was daunting: Write a song for an onstage moment of transcendence. Make it kind of funny and exciting and for a five-piece band. Write it so it justifies an audience sitting in their seats for two hours before they hear it. And, oh, it must plausibly be a rock hit in 1976.

- MARK KENNEDY

Tony Award nominee Will Butler tried to give the musicians in "Stereophonic" a sonic backstory when he was writing the play's songs.

That was the job facing singer-songwriter Will Butler and the music arrangers for just one of the songs that stud the Tony Award-nominated play “Stereophonic,” a leading contender at the June 16 Tony Awards.

“It’s like, ‘OK, that is a lot of things to think about, but let’s just try it out’ and we just tried it out,” says Butler, who left Arcade Fire in 2022 and has a new band, Sister Squares.

“Stereophonic” is playwright David Adjmi’s story of a Fleetwood Mac-like band in the mid-’70s recording music over a life-changing year, with personal rifts opening and closing and then reopening.

The music that accompanies the drama includes full-on rockers like “Masquerade” and “Drive” but also fragments and demos as the band reworks tunes. It is a wonderful slice of funky, classic rock for a fictional band that became a real one onstage.

“I was trying to get in their heads. I was also a lot of the time just trying to make a great song, which is a hard enough task. And then hopefully a great song can support many interpretations — that’s the dream.”

Butler was connected with Adjmi by a mutual friend, and they first met at a diner about 10 years ago. Butler had just moved to New York and writing for theatre intrigued him. It was a relaxed meeting and they hit it off: The two talked about “Moby Dick” for an hour.