Arcade Fire's Win Butler stars in ClickHole parody of 'behind the music' videos

'You can really write a song anywhere, one time I wrote a song on top of a grape'

It's pretty hard to distill the songwriting process down to something that can fit in a 3-minute video, and thankful ClickHole, The Onion's BuzzFeed-parodying sister site, has laid that bare with a surrealist 'How I Write A Song' masterclass with Arcade Fire's Win Butler.

He's the perfect fit for the faux interview, the band's latest album being all about the concept of content virality and overconsumption.

Some stand-out, surrealist lines:

"A really great song has three parts: a beak, an anus and a hat, and any good artist will be able to tell you when they got all three."

"When I sit down to write a song the first thing I usually do is take all my clothes off and throw up all over the place. That way I'm kind of in the groove, I don't have to worry about my clothes catching on fire and I don't have to take any breaks to throw up."

"I once got a vasectomy in case my vas defers was making my voice worse, it wasn't."

"You can really write a song anywhere, one time I wrote a song on top of a grape."

"Whenever I'm really stuck I'll usually email Paul McCartney and say 'You got another song in your or what, you old freaky fucker?' and every single time he responds with a fully composed song, lyrics, everything."