STACK#127 May 2016

MUSIC

COVER FEATURE

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Mumfords Walk a Little Wilder Mumford and Sons shake off the nu-folk tag for album three, dubbed Wilder Mind . Winston Marshall spoke to Jonathan Alley about love, cities, music and life.

thinking about ideas in the studio. Before, if the band immediately felt something wasn’t working, the song was discarded. But with no studio clock ticking, at least in the early stages before the band decamped to London for proper recordings, the world was their musical oyster. “One of his philosophies is to really explore every idea and chase them until they’re dead, which is a very slow, expensive way to work," Marshall says. "And so he instilled in us that sort of attitude. I think that’s the most important thing about Aaron and his influence.” The cover of Wilder Mind looks out over the London skyline from Primrose Hill, but the album is in ways a tale of two cities – their hometown of London, and New York City, where the album started and where many band members were living as the songs originally took shape. New York references pepper the album (Ditmas has a song named after it, and Greenwich Village’s Tompkins Square Park is immortalised in the opening track). “To us, it feels like two cities are the setting of the record, because they were the settings of our lives whilst writing it,“ says Marshall. “Moving from London to New York – it’s a huge change, and there are similarities; major cities you can do anything in, but New York shook me up, and it’s shaken all of us up. You know, we did a lot of writing all together in New York and it’s hard

Mind doesn’t so much kill off the Mumfords sound, as transform it. “For me it’s more of a driving record, like a movement like through the night, like, from evening through the night until morning,“says multi-instrumentalist Winston Marshall. “We were knackered and a little frustrated from playing those songs so many times, and really wanted to just play other instruments. We all play other instruments. Like, I’m a guitar player, Ted [Dwane] is a guitar player – he’s the bassist – and Marcus is a singer and drummer. So we were really desperate to play those other things.” But it wasn’t just wanting to have a go on each others’ toys that changed things: at the end of the Babel tour, the band found themselves in New York at a loose end, and after spending some time wandering around one of the greatest of cities in which to fossick about instrument shops and play with vintage amps, they found themselves hanging out with Aaron Dessner of The National, working up song ideas at his studio in Ditmas, Brooklyn. “He allowed us to be creative – in his studio as well – and we’re not that mad on studios ‘cause the pressure’s on, and money’s like – ‘time is money’. Because it’s his studio, there wasn’t that pressure and he’s just like, ‘Come down, do what you want.’“ The other thing Dessner gave the band was a new way of

B y late 2013, at the end of a

monumental world tour on the back of the Babel album that had taken

them across continents – and many unlikely and wonderful places – Mumford and Sons had arrived at a crossroads of sorts. They’d taken a train across the United States with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes and Old Crow Medicine Show, with the whole mad sojourn immortalised on film in the documentary Big Easy Express . They had staged the wonderfully-received Gentlemen of the Road adventure, turning up in small towns and at roadsides to unsuspecting audiences, many of whom might not have gotten out to see a live band in years. But, even after all these triumphs, there was a nagging sense in the back of the collective Mumford mind that perhaps a change of sorts was due. With two albums under their belts, Mumford and Sons were almost synonymous with nu-folk. They had been (almost) solely responsible for sky-rocketing banjo sales globally, and were in serious danger of being trapped in an all night hootenanny from whence they would never escape. Even after tongues are firmly removed from cheeks, the Mumfords were faced with the age-old choice – stay the same, and therefore predictable, or change things up and risk alienating at least an element of their rusted-on audience. But Wilder

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