SAVOURING IT
Fans divided over quartet’s move to electric have forgiven them enough to snap up show tickets
How a clementine can help you get in touch with your food,
The Mumford & Sons fan revolt appears to have subsided.
Three years after pissing off a lot of their crowd with an abrupt switch from acoustic to electric on their third album, Wilder Mind, the London quartet has carried on undaunted down the same pointedly non-folky path with this fall’s equally “rockist” and arena-ready followup, Delta. And no one seems to mind as much this time. At least not in Toronto, where the band is slated to play back-to-back shows Monday and Tuesday at the Scotiabank Arena a month after Delta posted a No. 1 debut on the Canadian Bill- board album chart.
“On our fourth record, we’re in good shape,” concedes bassist Ted Dwane, filling in on the phone for frontperson Marcus Mumford — the official line was that he was ill, but Dwane admitted the bandleader was just “optimizing his sleep” after a late night hosting a charity event — a few hours before a gig in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
“You never really know what to expect when you put an album out, whether it’s your first or your 10th or whatever. But
there’s a good mood among us at the moment. This North American tour has been great.
“Certainly, with the first two records, there was a bit of a ‘zeitgeist’ moment there, and I don’t think we ever really expected to continue playing arenas into our third and fourth albums. And it’s looking like we might get to do that and we’re really happy.”
Mumford & Sons have carried on playing big rooms, admittedly, by unashamedly blowing their sound up with the cheap seats in mind on Delta and Wilder Mind. Whether the band’s move from rustic, banjo-powered foot-stompin’ to Coldplay-worthy arena-rock melodrama is to your personal taste or not, it probably wasn’t the worst idea for it to speedily move on from the aforementioned retroacoustic zeitgeist that the instant international success of 2009’s Sigh No More and 2012’s Babel helped usher in, opening the door for the popular emergence of similarly folksy acts such as the Lumineers and Of Monsters and Men.
When a particular sound suddenly becomes trendy, it runs the risk of dating itself very quickly and Mumford & Sons were well aware of this fact. They had no intention of painting themselves into a stylistic corner, even if breaking out of that corner meant ruffling a few feathers.
As it did. Many fans were vocally horrified at the transformation heralded by Wilder Mind — although mercifully, as guitarist and banjo player Winston Marshall quipped to Rolling Stone in September, “we didn’t have people shouting ‘Judas’ ” the way Bob Dylan did when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival — and critics already divided over the band only became further divided.
The band took all the criticism in stride. It was, says Dwane, necessary to move on.
“Everyone’s got a lot to say about Mumford & Sons, so it was fine,” he chuckles. “We’re always making the records that we want to make. We don’t have any A&R, and we’re very lucky that we license our records, so we essentially get to maintain ownership and therefore we get to make what we want to make. There’s no one else messin’ around back there, so it’s just literally us, and we can really stand by what we make because of that fact.
“So Wilder Mind was a really important record for us to make and I think, actually, the way that Delta is being received at the moment really highlights how important Wilder Mind was. It was a liberation for us to get away from something that was quite formulaic.”
Ironically, to arrive at Delta’s oversized, electronically abetted anthemics, Mumford & Sons first made sure they sounded OK fully unplugged.
After writing and demoing upwards of 40 songs for the record-to-be over two years, the band had become “a bit lost in it” and decided to get Mumford to give them all a “campfire test” on his own before presenting the lot to producer Paul Epworth.
“Marcus did a recording of every single one of the songs we’d written with just him and a guitar, and that’s what we took into Epworth and he could make his selection from there,” says Dwane. “But, as we then worked the songs up under his guidance and his production, they were sort of finding their way back into the places that we’d taken them before the campfire test, so it was kind of an interesting experiment. ”
The two Scotiabank Arena gigs will see the end of touring duties for Mumford & Sons until mid January, when they’ll make their way to Australia for a run of dates.
After that, they’ve decided to take time out of their road schedule to dig back into the many unfinished, but still desir- able, tunes they’ve got lying around. There are so many, apparently, that the 61-minute Delta very nearly became a double album.
“We’re actually going to be back in the studio in February for a month with Epworth again,” says Dwane.
“We’ve got a lot of great songs that didn’t make it onto Delta, that didn’t fit on that body of work. There’s still a lot of material there that’s very much begun and kind of recorded, and so we want to finish it and see where we’re at.
“I feel like we need to keep up with our creativity a bit more than, perhaps, we’ve done in the past. Touring very quickly becomes ‘When you’re out, you’re out,’ and it makes a lot of sense to keep going once you’ve started, so you find yourself not releasing a record for three or four years. But I think that’s a cycle we want to break if we can.”
“You never really know what to expect when you put an album out, whether it’s your first or your 10th or whatever.” TED DWANE BASSIST, MUMFORD & SONS