MP3: Arcade Fire – Horn of Plenty
Canadian indie-rock titans Arcade Fire recorded several tracks for The Hunger Games film. “Horn of Plenty” is what they imagine “the national anthem of the fascist Capitol” from the books to sound like. I have no clue what that means, but I’m sure many others do. The Hunger Games earned a cool $152 million its opening weekend, though I imagine very few moviegoers went for Arcade Fire’s sake. It has a better soundtrack than previous phenom Twilight, that’s for sure. Other artists on The Hunger Games soundtrack include Neko Case, The Decemberists, The Civil Was, and Glen Hansard. Another one of Arcade Fire’s tracks on it, “Abraham’s Daughter“, premiered a few months ago.
A national anthem is supposed to sound, well, anthemic… and that’s why Arcade Fire are a perfect choice. Few other groups can write a swelling epic like Arcade Fire, and as shown in Where the Wild Things Are their music goes quite well with striking visuals — sometimes even stealing the show. Frontman Win Butler spoke of the track below:
“We were interested in making music that would be more integral in the movie, just as a mental exercise. And there’s an anthem that runs throughout the books, the national anthem of the fascist Capitol. So as a thought experiment, we tried to write what that might sound like. It’s like the Capitol’s idea of itself, basically. It’s not a pop song or anything – more of an anthem that could be playing at a big sporting event like the Games. So we did a structure for that, and then James Newton Howard made a movie-score version of it that happens in several places in the film.”
