It takes a shot of courage to completely change your sound after your first two albums climbed to No. 2 and No. 1 in the charts.
But that’s what Mumford & Sons did with its third album “Wilder Mind” released last month. Gone are the banjo, mini drum kick, and bluegrass twang. In their place are electric guitar, keyboard, and more of a rock ‘n roll throttle.
Mumford & Sons is one of the headliners for this year’s Bonnaroo Music Festival. The band is scheduled to play on the main stage Saturday night beginning at 11 p.m.
Band frontman Marcus Mumford talked with the Southern Standard as part of pre-Bonnaroo festivities. Mumford said even though the band’s first two albums, “Sigh No More” and “Babel” were extremely popular, Mumford & Sons was ready to move in a different direction with its third offering, “Wilder Mind.”
“Just doing what we did on ‘Sigh No More’ and ‘Babel’ again wouldn’t have worked for us,” said Mumford. “In fact, we would have just quit and not done it.”
He described the new sound as a natural progression and said it’s the kind of music Mumford & Sons is interested in playing now.
“It wasn’t so much proving anything to anyone,” said Mumford. “It was more just being honest about our own intentions and about our own taste. We’re not very good at pretending. So we wouldn’t want to make a record that pretended to be something that didn’t come from a real place within us. If we had done ‘Sigh No More’ or even the instrumentation from ‘Sigh No More’ and ‘Babel’ again that wouldn’t have been honest. It was more just like this is what we like, what we want to do right now guys. We hope you like it too.”
If album sales are any indication, Mumford & Sons will be just fine. “Wilder Mind” debuted at No. 1 in the United States and United Kingdom. Even with those sales, Mumford said he’s anxious to see how the new music is received by audiences. He said this is the first time Mumford & Sons has released a CD without first trying out some of the songs in concert. For this reason, he says there is still much that’s unknown about “Wilder Mind.”
“The main place we’re comfortable is on the road and we haven’t had crowd reactions to these new songs yet,” said Mumford. “You know, in the old days we would work up a new song in like sound checks or whatever and then we’d literally play it that night if it was kind of close to ready, or even if it wasn’t actually, which has led to some kind of disasters. But with these songs we went and we wanted to record them behind closed doors and write them behind closed doors and then to present the world with them when we felt ready. So we haven’t actually had the experience of presenting it live yet to people. I hope it goes well. There’s no real way of knowing yet.”
Mumford & Sons was formed in London, England in 2007. In addition to Mumford, band members include Ben Lovett, Winston Marshall, and Ted Dwane.
In this day of downloading music singles, Mumford says the band remains dedicated to the album concept and recording a product with a prevailing tone. He says he still enjoys buying CDs and listening to them from start to finish in the order the artist intended. He said changing the order of songs can alter the entire feel of an album and the listening experience.
“I still believe in the album as a format,” said Mumford. “I still believe in it as a concept. Maybe albums will get shorter but maybe there’s space, you know, to do special things on longer formats as well. We still certainly believe in the album which is why picking singles for us is a strange thing. We still write a whole album and put it together and then pick what we have to pick as singles afterwards because we believe in radio and we believe in, you know, that kind of stuff.
“I think a lot of people these days are writing in order to write as a single and I think you could lose a lot of interesting expression, interesting artistry, if you only wrote in order for it to be a hit song,” Mumford continued. “So I think the album is still really important because what we all think the album tracks are sometimes the best tracks on an album, like the ones that aren’t singles. And if the album goes away I’d be worried that you’d lose a lot of the more interesting, some of our favorite songs which are the album tracks. I still go to the store and buy a record and put it on and listen to it all the way through like twice or three times and then go back and cherry pick the songs that I love. In terms of track listing I mean we had a couple different goes of it and the album experience totally changed when we rearranged the songs. It’s amazing how much it changes your impression of an album. So I don’t know if we got it perfect but we got it right to our satisfaction. And that took a lot of work.”