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Mumfords
086 MAY 2015 JB Hi-Fi
visit COVER FEATURE MUSIC
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 New York and it’s hard
Walk a Little Wilder