Mumford And Sons: Gentlemen Of The Road

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Sigh No More took the Mumfords on a wild ride. In an industry dominated by people like Adele, Beyonce and Taylor Swift, Mumford & Sons became unlikely pop stars. Their songs went platinum and their album sold more than four million copies, transforming folk music from a somewhat bankrupt genre into a cash crop. When the smoke began to clear in early 2011, a killer performance at the Grammys backing Bob Dylan ignited the fire all over again, increasing American interest in the band and convincing the boys to schedule another year’s worth of touring, even though they were supposed to do something else in 2011: record their second album.

They wound up doing both. Babel was written and recorded during a year-long period, with work being completed in quick spurts whenever the band’s touring schedule allowed. It’s a studio album, but it’s heavily influenced by the band’s live show. The dynamics are wider than before – the highs stratospheric, the lows subterranean – and the band’s four-part harmonies are tighter, any rough spots whittled away by four years of heavy touring and constant practice. Close your eyes and it’s easy to imagine the light show, the bright flashes of white during each chorus, the warm washes of red and blue during the ballads.

The songwriting process began in a small house in Nashville, Tennessee, where the Mumfords shacked up for a week in early 2011. A year’s worth of touring lay ahead, and the boys wanted the chance to knock out a few songs before jumping back on the bus. They used their time well, hammering out new tunes like “Lovers’ Eyes” during the day and spending their evenings all over Nashville. When the urge to play another gig became too great, they took over a friend’s basement and played a house show to 350 people, including out-of-town celebs like Jake Gyllenhaal and Carrie Mulligan (who later married Marcus, despite tabloid rumors that she’d gone to the show as Gyllenhaal’s date).

“I woke up the next morning and US Weekly was ringing my phone,” says homeowner Mike Harris, a local guitarist whose own band, The Apache Relay, tours with Mumford & Sons on a semi-regular basis. “We didn’t really think of the consequences of having that many people show up to my basement, but that’s what happens when these guys infiltrate a town. They want to see it. And people want to see them.”

In a way, it was a week-long party. “We didn’t know how many distractions we’d find in Nashville,” Dwane admits, laughing. Still, that whirlwind week in Tennessee helped set the tone for the months to come, delivering proof that the guys could tour and work on Babel at the same time. It also spawned some of the album’s best songs.

“I woke up one morning to Ben playing the piano part to “Hopeless Wanderer,” and we hadn’t written that one yet,” Marcus remembers. “My bedroom was right next to the living room, where we had a little setup. I was in bed, hungover, and I thought, ‘Fuck, I need to get in that room, because that sounds amazing.’ We wrote the song that day. In the evenings, we’d have friends come over and pick with us. A lot of inspiration came out of those picking parties.”

After the Nashville sessions, the band hit the road again, eventually winding up in London. They booked some time at a studio in Bermondsey, where early versions of “I Will Wait,” “Not With Haste,” “Broken Crown,” “Lover Of The Light” and the waltzing title track were bashed out. Next, they relocated to a farm in Somerset and spent several days challenging each other to write as many songs as possible. “The Reminder” was finished by the time they left.

As the year went on, Mumford & Sons started throwing some new tunes into the setlist, seeing how the newbies stacked up against the more familiar cuts from Sigh No More. The songs fit right in. Babel wasn’t shaping up to a complete rehash of the previous album, but it was still steeped in the same mix of folk, pop and roots-rock. For bands like U2 – bands that change direction every album, following a record like Rattle & Hum with the vastly different Achtung Baby – those similarities would’ve been career suicide. For the Mumfords, it was just an extension of the sound they began exploring in 2007.

“We’ve only made one other album,” Dwane points out. “Sonically, it does our listeners a favor to keep some consistency between these two records. We’ve obviously grown up in the past few years, a lot has changed, and the sound is evolving, as it should. We were quite keen to keep some elements of consistency, though.”

Marcus nods his head. “We’re still doing what we’ve always done, which is going out on the road and playing our songs live. It just felt like, “Hey, this is our sound,” and we wanted to put it down on record. An album, to us, is about voicing where we’re at. We want to document one point in time, and this record is exactly that.”

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