VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Sarah Neufeld Reveals How Arcade Fire First Started

We, Arcade Fire‘s first album in five years is finally here.

Arcade Fire violinist Sarah Neufeld sat down for an interview with uInterview founder Erik Meers to discuss how she joined the band nearly 20 years ago.

“It was all part of the same English-speaking art community … in Montreal, it’s very small and at that time there’s always a group of people around the same age playing in bands,” Neufeld explained. “They kind of overlapped together so Richie [Reed Parry] started playing with Arcade Fire in the early 2000s and we were playing music and we shared a space with them and then it just felt like, I mean we all kind of played in each other’s bands and I was a string player and often people in bands ‘Oh you should come in and record a song’ or play, ‘Come play with us. Sometimes people want strings. It was kind of that community. For me, it was the right place for the right time, too, because it’s not something I’d set out to do. I didn’t set out to try to join a big rock band. It was a big rock band then, it was my friend’s band that was down the street so I sort of jumped in in 2003 and they were working on the first album so I got to be a part of that and then it really just took off from there and it was a very, very, very fun experience as a young person who had never traveled much before. I hadn’t seen a lot of the States. I hadn’t been to Europe so all of a sudden we were sort of going all over the world, playing these crazy, small, packed, sweaty, insane shows of the early 2000s.”

The five-time Grammy award-winning band has been busy promoting their new album leading up to Sunday’s release, including a performance on Saturday Night Live.

Stream Arcade Fire’s latest album We everywhere.