Check out some background info on the new album from this press release...
"We
wanted to do something unashamed," says Mumford & Sons musician Ben Lovett. "We're confident
and happy to be where we are as a band - everything that's happened with
us has exceeded expectations, and it's all been a surprise, it's all
much bigger than what we were prepared for. So when we came to recording
this record we had a choice: to shy away from that, or to realise that
people dig what we're doing, and make something robust, with that
energy."
By December 2010, Mumford & Sons had been on the road since
the previous summer: a glorious, eventful, yet relentless time. Standing
somewhere between exhilarated and exhausted, the plan now was for the
band's four members to spend a few weeks apart, write, recuperate, and
then reconvene in Nashville in the New Year, with the intention of
trying out material for their second album.
The informality of the set-up in Tennessee perhaps helped to dispel any nerves they may have had about following up 2009's Sigh No More
- an album that had gone twice platinum in the US, and four times
platinum in the UK. The band assembled in the front room of a house and
set about sharing the songs they had been working on alone.
"It was a
coming together, a sharing of some stuff," explains Lovett (keys,
accordion, drums), "a pool of ideas that would come out of our time
apart. So if there was nervousness, it wasn't nervousness about the
record, it was nervousness about how a couple of these new song ideas
would go down. But we knew we were going to play music, and it wasn't
time to get into the nuts and bolts of it, it was more like we were
starting another year from this point. And that felt very good. Very
fresh, and natural."
Out
of that time in Nashville came a couple of songs for the new record -
the gorgeous Lovers' Eyes and Hopeless Wanderer. Then followed more
touring, performances at the Grammys and the Brits, before the chance
came in the summer to head into a studio in Bermondsey, south London.
Here the band recorded the title song for the soundtrack to Wuthering
Heights, as well as finding the footings for several of the new album's
songs: Babel, I Will Wait, Not With Haste, Broken Crown, Lover of the Light.
"And
then," recalls Marcus Mumford (lead vocals, guitar, drums), "we went
down to a farm in Somerset and played the 10 song game, which is where
you have to write 10 songs each in a set period of time without any
criteria for quality." The result of the 10 song game, the band recall
with some amusement, was firstly that Ted Dwane (string bass, drums,
guitar) has a natural propensity for writing murder ballads, and
secondly a new album track named Reminder.
"It's
such a nice exercise because it removes your focus on perfection," says
Dwane. "You drop your guard down and you sort of bash about." For
Mumford, it also helped to re-focus to the material already amassed.
"There were various points in the album where we felt maybe we needed to
inject more directness, and maybe that's what Reminder did," he says.
"There's a bit more obscurity in this album and Reminder is a really
emotionally identifiable song. I think I Will Wait Was the Same. And in
terms of making the best record we could we felt like we needed those
songs."
2011
took shape slowly - throughout that year they were establishing the
album's "cornerstone songs", discussing the new material with producer
Markus Dravs - who had also steered Sigh No More ("He's like a mind
master," says Lovett) and engineer Robin Baynton ("He has the best
ears," says Mumford "but he'll never sacrifice vibe for accuracy")
finding more writing and studio time wherever their schedule would
allow. But more importantly they were trying to work out just what kind
of record they were making. "I don't think any of us had any idea then
about what we were trying to do," says Lovett, frankly. "We had a body
of songs and we just really wanted to record them. And we thought that
was all you needed. But we learned that wasn't quite the case."
Shortly
before Christmas, they decided to stand back and take stock of what
they had, heading down to Lovett's parents' home in Devon for a review
of the new material. "And that's really where we had the vision for the
album," says Mumford, "or where it solidified." "We were suddenly really
confident and happy with what we were making," adds Dwane. "We were all
on-site, all pistols firing. I think the album started to assert its
own identity a little bit, it started to make sense, and we knew then
what we were making."
Babel's
identity Dwane describes as simply "Very us. When we made the first
album it was to be a snapshot of Mumford & Sons in 2009. This is
exactly the same - but it's us now, and there's a lot of the live energy
in there - that was very much what we were trying to capture. Creating
the album over the course of a year, going into the studio then back out
touring, then back into the studio ... it's almost as if the road has
rubbed off on the album."
The influence of the phenomenal live band Mumford and Sons have become is much in evidence on Babel,
from the fire and fury of the title track to the keen and tender
yearning of the album's closer, Not With Haste. "I think over the past
few years we've realised how much we have to play the songs that we've
recorded," says Mumford. "So we thought harder about these songs,
feeling confident that we could play them again and again and again, and
that however you record a song gives it its own life."
As
a result, several songs on Babel were recorded live. "When you're in a
room with headphones and microphones and no one else, you play it quite
differently to how you play it live," says Mumford. "Having played live
as much as we have these past five years, it's probably made us a bit
more high-octane, a bit more adrenaline-filled, but because of that we
probably also need to counter it more. But we really wanted to allow
permission for quiet songs on the album, so that we could allow
permission for them live as well."
More than anything, there is a real a sense of completeness to Babel,
a satisfying wholeness and a kind of musical and lyrical wealth -
romanticism tempered by strength and vigour; a brawniness balanced by
beauty. "I think there's more subject-matter on this album, and I think
we've grown up a little bit," says Mumford. "I feel like it's more
exposed, more naked. Ted always talked about wanting to make an album
like a story," he adds. "Not necessarily one that has a plot, but one
that you can listen from top to bottom and it makes sense. I think
that's what we've tried to do, and what we've done."
Winston
concludes, "And now we've finished it we can get touring again, which
is what we set out to do when we started the band. Back to business."
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