Mumford & Sons grow into their fourth album
After nearly a decade in the glare of global fame, Mumford & Sons look inward for album No 4.
Something strange can happen to those few artists who are talented and lucky enough to be thrust into global fame on the cusp of adulthood. If the shift from nobodies to somebodies happens quickly, or if egos are not kept in check by external forces, it can instil a kind of arrested development or even a regression.
As journalist Craig Mathieson noted in his 2009 book Playlisted, high-end touring for rock and pop bands is liberating and comforting, as it offers a return to the womblike state of first conception.
Successful musicians can come to inhabit a world where they float inside an enclosed space while being transported everywhere and given constant nourishment. With this in mind, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised if some of these same musicians start to act like big babies.
Ben Lovett knows a little about this kind of rarefied life, where nightly performances before adoring thousands become the norm. Almost a decade ago, the band he formed with three friends became popular throughout much of the English-speaking world for the impassioned brand of folk-rock music heard on its 2009 debut, Sigh No More.
He and his bandmates in Mumford & Sons — Winston Marshall, Ted Dwane and Marcus Mumford — were each around the age of 21 when a song named Little Lion Man made the jump from London to Australia. That track would soon reach No 1 on the Triple J Hottest 100 music poll of 2009, and set in motion a whirlwind of perpetual travel, songwriting, recording and performance that scarcely has slowed since. It’s only in the downtime, in the quiet moments between the stadium floodlights and the solace of hotel rooms, that an artist can reflect on their path to date.
Early September finds Lovett living in such a moment, as it’s a little over three years since the release of third album Wilder Mind, which charted at No 1 in seven countries, including Australia, the US and Britain. Since 2015, he and his bandmates have been drafting and redrafting songs for a fourth album while also coming to terms with aspects of their lives that previously had been minimised, if not hidden outright.
When Review speaks to Lovett, the keyboardist is pacing beside a quiet Thames River, not far from a London recording studio where the band and producer Paul Epworth are working through the final mix of an album named Delta. Audible in his voice is that conflicting sense of confidence and uncertainty that clouds artistic minds during the final stages of a project, wherein the window to second-guess creative decisions is quickly closing.
“I’m 31 now, and I feel like I’m just starting to come to terms with my personality and my humanity in a way that I didn’t care about 10 years ago,” he says. “But I’m becoming more aware about my actions and intentions. I think something happens around our age; things slightly shift gears. People say you become a man at 18, but I think it might be happening around now. You start to become aware of things in a different way. It certainly feels like a lot of waking up was happening in this record.”
Looking back, Lovett realises much of the band’s earlier lyrics contain questions that reflect the truth of young men searching for their respective places in the world. “We were naive and there’s a beauty to naivety; there’s a fearlessness and a hopefulness to it,” he says. “It’s like the lights haven’t turned up too much yet, to see other stuff that can happen in life. I’m proud of those years because they gave us the confidence to just go for it. There was no question in our minds; we’d get out there on the road, get on a plane, and find ourselves at [Austin, Texas music festival] South by Southwest.”
At the time, they didn’t give a lot of thought to their future as a band, or to how its fan base — small as it was in 2009 — might react to certain songs or sounds.
“There was just no doubt,” Lovett says of its early days. “I think that’s a very childlike naivety to just go for it, as adventurers, whereas now I think we have a bit more responsibility, by contrast. There’s kids involved now, and wives. The stakes have got higher.”
To linger for a moment on that arresting image of bright lights being suddenly turned up: beyond the young families that some of his bandmates are building, has there been anything else on Lovett’s mind of late, while working on Delta?
“It’s been tough,” he replies. “I went through a very painful divorce and we’ve had family members who we’ve lost. It’s been a real journey these last few years and I don’t see that letting up. So I think that this album cycle and having these songs is going to be important, both internally — but hopefully it’s also going to provide some degree of solidarity or comfort to others. I get the impression that once you cross the threshold into life getting more real, you don’t go back; it just continues to amass,” he says. “I have a renewed respect and admiration for the older generation, just because I feel every day I get older, I’m in awe of what they carry and what they must have seen.”
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Last year was a quiet one by the band’s touring standards, as it involved only two dozen concerts. A handful of shows in May remain front of mind, however. “We did three shows with U2, just ’cause they asked and we thought, ‘That would be really fun,’ ” Marcus Mumford says.
“We played three stadiums with them in Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco, and I learned more in those three shows than I had over the last 100 Mumford & Sons shows. Just watching the way they worked; the way they operated with their crew backstage, and watching their crew themselves; watching how they connected with the audience and how they rehearsed every day — there was just so much to learn,” the singer, guitarist and drummer says. “Whatever people think of them, you can’t knock the fact that they’ve worked f..king hard, and they’ve done it for a really long time, and they’ve survived as a band in a place where lots of other people wouldn’t.”
A lot is wrapped up in that brief anecdote, not least that it captures a neat capsule of the exclusive circles in which the band now rubs shoulders: after all, when U2 summons you to join the best-selling concert tour of 2017 — which took in $316 million and reported a total of 2.71 million tickets sold, according to Pollstar — it’s fair to say you’ve made it.
Although these gentlemen of the road wouldn’t dare make the comparison, there is that same aspect of womblike protection surrounding U2: four men who have been world-famous for longer than the four men of Mumford & Sons have been alive.
As well, it shows the frontman’s willingness to learn from his elders, in the same way that Lovett — his childhood friend of 23 years — mentions his renewed respect for the experiences of those who came before him.
“There’s definitely people in the music industry that we’re able to call up and ask for help; people like [Universal Music UK chief executive] David Joseph, Bono and Elton John — he’s hilarious, and quite helpful,” says Mumford. “I think we’re really lucky and well-placed, and we also love listening to people. I love an expert, and if you want to talk to an expert, talk to Elton John — he’s a f..king expert.”
While recording its previous three albums, the quartet tended to exclude studio visitors so as to not be distracted from the task at hand. That all changed with Delta, and may be a reflection of a growing confidence in sharing its creative process, not to mention the influence of British producer Epworth, whose credits include Adele, Rihanna and U2.
“We had more people in and out of the studio than we’ve ever had before,” says Mumford. “We’ve always had a kind of closed-door policy in the studio, including record labels and publicists, and we’ve always checked with each other for when family and friends could come in and visit, and it was pretty rare. But on this one, we’ve had people in from day one. It’s nice to have other people there to distract you, to have a chat while there’s other work going on, so you do stick around and you don’t f..k off.”
On Wilder Mind, the band steered clear of acoustic instruments such as banjo and upright bass out of a desire to move beyond its roots in search of a new sound. “On this one, there are no instruments that we vetoed at any point; everything has been allowed,” says Mumford. “In that sense, it’s felt a bit more like the spirit of the 60s in the studio; less cynicism about the recording process, less second-guessing of ‘What will people think of this?’ There’s not been any of that, really, and there might have been a bit of that on the second [Babel] and third record, certainly. It’s felt really free.”
Another factor in this feeling of liberation is that Delta represents the quartet’s most collaborative effort to date. “We want healthy competition between songs but not between writers,” says Mumford. “So it doesn’t matter who wrote what, and often a song will be a hybrid of three different writers. I think the fact that we all write and the fact that we all feel invested in the writing hopefully gives us a better shot at being a band for a really long time.”
In this context, the connection with U2 makes more sense, as the Irish rock act has never wavered from its unique chemistry of four members, despite significant stylistic experimentation and expansion since it was formed in 1976. “We just thought we’d love to be in a band together for the rest of our lives, really,” says Mumford. “It’s pretty unusual; not many people do it, and we love the idea of doing it. We want to give ourselves the best shot we can.”
Although he has spoken previously about his regret for the band name, which inaccurately positions him as singular songwriter and leader — “It’s a ball-ache; we thought about changing it, but it’s a bit late now,” he told NME in 2015 — it is nonetheless his name on the tin, so to speak. Have there been any moments during the band’s decade together, though, when that guiding principle of being friends and equals came close to being disrupted?
“No, I don’t think so; I think we’ve just been finetuning it,” Mumford replies. “We’ve never had these big fights; it’s never been that dramatic. We had all the really difficult conversations right at the beginning of the life of the band and since then we’ve never had to have a really hard one again. I think it helps that we’re all friends before we were bandmates. We weren’t put together by Simon Cowell in a TV show, which I think must be very difficult. Once we make a decision, we count it as a band decision, and we all trust the process, so a band decision sticks.”
Trusting that process has served the band very well so far. With another 60 concerts in 13 countries just announced, and no doubt more to come, next year will offer yet more chances for the quartet to return to the womblike conditions of life on the road — only this time they’re older, wiser and more willing to listen and learn than ever before.
Delta is released on November 16 via Dew Process/Universal. Mumford & Sons will perform in Brisbane on January 15 next year, then Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.