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Mumfords
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.
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 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
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
Walk a Little Wilder
o
28 MAY 2015 JB Hi-Fi
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