Mumford & Sons Talk New Album And More On The Zach Sang Show

04-04-2025

(The Zach Sang Show) Mumford & Sons sit down with The Zach Sang Show at Amazon to talk about their new album Rushmere. In the interview, they share how adjusting to life as a trio feels like they are "in a new band," how working with Dave Cobb stripped the band back to their basics and what they learned from collaborating with Pharrell.

They also talk about coming up with the band name Mumford & Sons and some of the terrible names they considered instead, whether to banjo or not to banjo, and answer the question "where have all the waistcoats gone?"

Then, Marcus Mumford reveals how wife Carey Mulligan pushed him to escape to Istanbul to find the lyrics to "Rushmere," saying "I sat in a café for three days and drank coffee and smoked cigars and wrote poetry like a prick." He also shares that Mulligan's first impression of Mumford & Sons was that they were "quite shouty."

Here are some excepts: How Carey Mulligan Pushed Marcus Mumford to Escape to Istanbul-And Finally Finish "Rushmere" Where He "Wrote Poetry Like A Prick"...

Dan Zolot: Didn't you say you had to travel to find the lyrics?

Marcus Mumford: I did, yeah, I did it. I had to go digging. My wife like, kicked me out the house. She's like, "You're driving yourself, and me, by the way, insane. You've just got to go somewhere and be away from home and go and be an artist for a few days." So I went to Istanbul on my way to Jerusalem, and I sat in a cafe for three days and drank coffee and smoked cigars and wrote poetry like a prick. I've been in denial for a long time about being an artist, and I just allowed myself to go and be an artist for a few days, and then the Rushmere lyric came, and I texted these lads, and then we're good to go.

Zach Sang: But that lyric is very reminiscent of your early days.

Marcus Mumford: Yeah, I had to go very far away from them to be able to look back at them. But I only realize that now talking to you, yeah,

Zach Sang: "Take me back to empty lawns and nowhere else to go." This started as a poem. You say, "come get lost in a fairground crowd where no one knows your name. There's only honest mistakes. There's no price to a wasted hour." It's beautiful.

Marcus Mumford: Yeah, I love that lyric now. It was a f***ing nightmare to get it. It took forever.

Mumford & Sons Talk About What They Learned From Collaborating With Pharrell...

Ben Lovett: The Pharrell sessions so far have been incredibly enlightening, because he is an absolute force of nature. We've been working with him on and off. You know, this is all part of the two year process. It's all kind of, anyone who would take some time and make music with us, you know, we're kind of in a yes mode, and it's been great working with him, like we said that song, "Good People" has come out of it. But you know, we're still we're still experimenting, and his process is just completely fresh and different to how we've experienced things before, and same with Dave [Cobb] and. Aaron [Dessner] and other people. It's just like, it's similar to the geographical shift up like, a song, can be kind of anywhere geographically, but also when you're working in a different balance of creative energy and power in a room where things are sort of shifting around, it can lead to an idea that maybe wouldn't have got dislodged if it's just the same every single time. And anyway, I like that I could spend like an hour talking about just observing how Pharrell has his hands open for songs. It's incredible. And I actually, I know people think so highly of him, but I think that there's not even a half of it like he's really a creative genius.

Marcus Mumford Talks About How Wife Carey Mulligan Thought Mumford & Sons Was "Quite Shouty" After Her First Show...

Marcus Mumford: I was staying at a friends house here in Los Angeles, and I wrote to her out of the blue because we hadn't spoken for a couple of years. She'd come to a Laura Marling show that we supported Laura at, and she was like, "Mumford, oh yeah." She thought it was a bit shouty, , and she slipped a note to my tour manager,. I didn't see her, and then I think it had her email on it, and then I wrote to her, and that was a couple years later.

Mumford & Sons on Life as a Trio: "Right Now Feels Like Being a New Band"...

Ben Lovett: So, you know, the balance with four people, it's majority rules, I guess, a bit more seamlessly. Whereas with three, I think we've had to work harder to, and I don't want to misquote something Marcus said a couple of months ago, but we need to be better at finding more consensus. It isn't okay for one person just to tap out when there's only three of you like, when we've learned that you have to kind of continue finding the common ground. Whereas I think with that's the more people that you add to that collaboration, the more it's okay to like, for someone to not necessarily get what they want.. So like, you know, as you get into millions and millions of people, there's always gonna be someone who's upset. But like, with, three, I think that's actually very satisfying. I think we're finding a groove with it. That's like, you have to employ a bit more reason. Make your arguments a bit stronger, whether that's creatively or otherwise interesting,

Marcus Mumford: You have to know your mind a bit more. I think that's what I've noticed. I think there's an intentionality to knowing what and spending time and energy figuring out what you really think, rather than being able to go with the flow more. It's just that everything's a little more exposed because there's only three of us to discuss it. That's certainly led to a point here where we've all been really honest with each other. There's less hiding to be done because it's a smaller crowd. right now feels like being a new band. Feels like a first record, actually. It feels most similar to when we were setting up Sigh No More.

How Mumford & Sons Landed on Their Name-And the Terrible Alternatives They Considered...

Ben Lovett: I just remember the pub that we were having this conversation in when we were actually deciding it. It was just Putney Bridge, the north side of the park, and we had used the name because in the early days, Marcus had gathered a collection of songs, and was gathering various combinations. And actually, I think at one point it was Merry Men. And we had played a few shows as Mumford and Sons, and then we're like, "Should we just go and have a drink and talk about this for a minute? "So we went and talked. So I think we talked about, like, maybe 15 or 20 different, even worse band names.

Marcus Mumford: Sun Never Sets On The Cool Kids was my favorite. (laughs)

Ben Lovett: And we were like, maybe we should just stick with it. And you know, part of what made us feel comfortable with sticking with it was, at that point we could see about two weeks into our future, and no one thought that we were going to be in Los Angeles having this conversation.

Ted Dwayne: In that chat was like, it would only really be a problem if, like, you went international, or if you played shows, people say. It's probably not really gonna be a thing. We're like, Yeah, let's just go with it. (laughs)

Marcus Mumford: Well, was a time when there were lots of bands like Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit or all these bands that had like, a person's name and the band's name, Or it was like The Kooks, The Zutons, The Strokes, there's lots of "The's". And we were like, well, what feels a bit more us and a bit more British than that? Calling it something with a family name, like a family business, felt representative of how we were thinking about doing our business at the time. And it was like, no one else had the name, so we did it.

Mumford & Sons On Working With Dave Cobb - And How He Stripped Their Sound Back To Basics...

Zach Sang: Can you tell me why you went to Dave Cobb for this album? Why'd you go to a country music guy?

Marcus Mumford: We had known what he'd done with, like, Brandi Carlile very well. And those Brandi records that he made aren't country records, to me, They're Americana. Obviously, what he's done with Sturgill [Simpson] and what he's done with Chris Stapleton is more in that lane, but it's like alt country. To me, it's not straight up shiny - which I happen to love - country. The guy is the biggest Beatles fan I've ever met in my life, and I've met a lot of them, and I would count myself as one. He is encyclopedic on his knowledge of the history of British bands, and hasn't worked with many British bands at all. And so he actually came to the UK on the first recording session we did at my place, I've got a little studio, and he came, and it was the first time he's recorded in the UK I think.

Ben Lovett: It might have been the first time he's slept without air conditioning.

Marcus Mumford: He wasn't thrilled about that. It was unseasonably warm as well, but, but yeah....he was like, "I want to hear your band with the curtain pulled back. I want to hear what it's like when the three of you play acoustic instruments in a room together. Because I haven't heard that for a while." And he's like, "Actually, really have wanted to make a Mumford and Sons record for a while. And here's why, I want to hear your kick drum through my Beatles desk. And I want to hear your voice like, right up. I don't want to hear any tricks. I don't want to hear any, like, over produced, like 1000s of pedals on electric guitars. I want to hear an acoustic guitar and a kick drum and a double bass, and you guys singing properly together and strip it all back and don't do any of the tricks you don't need the toy box. Let's just hear the band as they are right now." And we were stoked by that, that lined up perfectly with the songs that we'd written, of which there were a handful, and then we wrote more as we went. And we recorded with him in Devon, and then we moved to Nashville, to his room at RCA, which was actually, funnily enough, like too big and too shiny. And we didn't get huge amount from our time at RCA, even though it's like one of the legendary music studios. We ended up back at his house in Savannah, Georgia, really, which is where he's built studio, and we recorded most of the record in there and that felt just right for the songs that we'd written.