Mumford smiles when I remind him of a Bono quote from 1985, in which the U2 frontman predicted a counterintuitive future for music in a coming “electronic age”: “It’ll be totally naturalist, probably acoustic.… That’ll be the music on the college campuses, because it’ll remind us of something we’ve lost.” Says Mumford, “He’s a prophet.” But they believe they’re feeding a certain hunger. The band members are savvy enough to reject the corny idea that their songs are somehow more “real” than, say, electronic music – especially since Mumford is a fervent Radiohead fan. Echoing Neil Young‘s reaction to America’s “Horse With No Name,” Mumfords keyboardist Ben Lovett, 26, was half-convinced that Phillips’ soundalike hit “Home” was the real thing: “I was like, What’s that? Did we do that?'” Mumford & Sons’ sound is now considered so commercial that an American Idol winner, Phillip Phillips, ripped it off last year (and the Lumineers are building a whole career on it). Justin Timberlake has the dressing room next door Taylor Swift is hidden away down the hall. Grammys – and in a few hours the Mumfords will beat out One Direction for British Group of the Year. In the second decade of the 21st century, they’ve managed to push acoustic instruments and crowd-around-the-mic harmonies toward the center of pop culture. “The diva twig!”īut collectively, Mumford & Sons are all about the holy wood. “The prima donna stick,” he says, sending Mumford into bent-over, bellowing laughter.
Banjo player and designated wiseass Winston Marshall – the youngest at 25 – is less impressed. Ted Dwane, the band’s stand-up-bass player – at 28, the oldest and steadiest member, the one all his bandmates go to for advice – has also taken to palo santo, with his own supply at home.
Burnett, meanwhile, recruited Mumford to work on the soundtrack to a new Coen brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, set in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, which happens to co-star Carey Mulligan, Mumford’s wife of 11 months. “Because that feels so recent.” The O Brother soundtrack won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2002, and Mumford & Sons’ second album, Babel, took the same prize this year. “I always feel slightly embarrassed saying how much of an influence O Brother was,” says Mumford, who was only 13 or so when it came out. Says Mumford, “Springsteen found a way to make acoustic instruments sound big.”) (Another important touchstone: Bruce Springsteen‘s banjo-powered Seeger Sessions Band, especially the Live in Dublin album. The producer T Bone Burnett recently turned him on to it, which is appropriate: Burnett assembled 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, a roots-music primer that was a key influence on the sepia-toned aesthetic of Mumford & Sons, the band Mumford fronts. “I’ve tried everything, pills, even went and had my brain scanned,” he says. Mumford, 26, has been suffering from brutal tension headaches for the past two months, and he swears that palo santo, a South American incense wood, is the only thing that helps. But there’s something searching and vulnerable in his eyes, which appear to waver between brown and blue (“Mother calls it hazel,” he says). He’s a big, broad-faced guy – cocky, kind of loud, currently sporting an Errol Flynn-ish mustache. When Mumford punctuates a sentence with “mate,” he’ll sometimes give you a friendly thump on the back even when he doesn’t, the backslap is implicit.
“Palo santo,” he says, with half-joking reverence, breathing deep as his band’s sterile dressing room fills with citrusy fumes, an ancient intrusion on this modern space. Deep within the glass-and-steel shell of London’s still-shiny-new 02 arena, beneath what used to be called the Millennium Dome, Marcus Mumford is setting a chunk of wood on fire.
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