Mumford And Sons: Gentlemen Of The Road

Videos by American Songwriter

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It’s nighttime in Louisville, and Waterfront Park is full. There are college kids and Baby Boomers, hippies and hipsters, businessmen and burnouts. Everyone is waiting for Mumford & Sons, and when the guys walk onstage around 9 o’clock, the place goes wild. A riff from Marcus’ acoustic guitar kicks off the first song, “Lovers’ Eyes,” which moves right into “Little Lion Man.” “I Will Wait,” Babel’s first hit single, is next. Watching the musicians, it’s hard not to get swept away by the music. Lovett hunches his torso over the keyboard, headbanging along to the drumbeat, and Marshall gyrates his body back and forth like a hillbilly Shakira, doing a dance his fans have dubbed “the banjo roll.” There’s no posturing – only lights, music and the electricity generated by several thousand screaming fans.

Producer Markus Dravs wanted no part in this live spectacle, at least not during the twelve months it took to record Babel. Once the band started playing their new songs in concert, he stopped attending their shows. There was just too much visual stimuli. As producer of Sigh No More and Babel, his job was to be a pair of ears, not a pair of eyes.

Marshall understands that mentality. “You can get away with a lot more live. You can fall back on things. You’re in a completely different space when you’re in the studio, listening back to something without the visuals or the atmosphere or the crowd around you. I think Markus didn’t want to have his vision skewed by watching us live.”

Recording sessions were shoehorned into the boys’ touring schedule. They’d come home for a week or two, spend most of that time in the studio, then go back on the road. The process repeated itself month after month, with the location changing constantly. One week, the Mumfords would be recording individual tracks in a state-of-the-art British studio. The next, they’d be setting up their equipment in a barn, or doing live takes in someone’s living room. Marcus Mumford even did some vocal overdubs in Paris.

The living rooms had the biggest impact. “Those places mostly belonged to family and friends,” Lovett says, “and that’s where the record actually came together. We felt comfortable making music there, just playing the songs live. It changed our focus and it changed the vibe.”

“We didn’t have to pay by the hour, either,” Marshall chimes in, “which factored quite heavily.”

Like the album before it, Babel is about heavy hearts and weary minds. The songs are littered with references to religion and literature, and the themes are universal, applying to anyone who’s fallen in (or out) of love. But more importantly, it’s about a band, a group of friends who chose to keep working long after they’d earned a holiday, recording a new batch of songs all the while. It’s about returning to one’s wife or girlfriend at the end of a long tour – “Well, I came home like a stone, and I fell heavy into your arms,” goes the first line from “I Will Wait” – and leaving the very next morning to find some studio, some barn, some room where new songs could be born. It’s about endurance and humor and the thing that happens when four voices wrap themselves in harmony. It’s about Mumford & Sons.

“We dropped ‘I Gave You All’ from the set for a little while,” Lovett says, referencing one of the sadder ballads from Sigh No More, “and we brought it back for this tour. In a dressing room in England, we put on the album and listened. We rarely listen to our records, and we were like, ‘Is that really what this song sounded like on the record?’ I think it sounds really young and kind of embryonic, in comparison with where we are now. I think it represents us at that point. We wanted to grow past that and go somewhere else, though, and that’s what Babel represents. We’re already scheming about where we’re going to be next, with our future records … and before we make them, we’ll probably listen back to Babel and say, ‘What were we thinking? I guess that was us, then.’”

 

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