Looking back at a 2015 conversation with the band as they embraced electricity, faced backlash, and plotted the most old-timey tour imaginable.
The last time Marcus Mumford and Winston Marshall were in Louisville, they were standing on a 100-year-old steamboat, because someone decided that if Mumford & Sons were in town, they should be somewhere aggressively old-timey. The boat, the Bell of Louisville, is still operational, still losing most of its races, and still the site of a lingering band fantasy.
“We want to do a tour down the Mississippi on a steamboat,” Mumford said, immediately admitting, “It’s a pipe dream.”
“An attainable dream,” Marshall corrected. “People have done it.”
That mix of ambition and self-awareness runs straight through Wilder Mind, a record that arrived as both a reinvention and an open invitation for backlash. Louder guitars, fewer banjos, and a willingness to let the songs dictate the sound rather than the other way around. “We wrote these songs and felt like the sound could be slightly different to support them,” Mumford explained. “Sound is a vehicle for the song. We just follow our noses.”
They knew what that might invite. “As you get more famous, you get more backlash for no specific reason,” Marshall shrugged. Anticipating it wasn’t really the point. “We never really minded,” he said. “We love the record. We loved making it. Now we love playing it.”
That confidence, naturally, drew accusations. “I’m going to accuse you of being smug,” came the jab.
“Why smug?” Marshall laughed. “Because you like your own record?”
What followed was a quick detour into self-deprecation. Marshall admitted he doesn’t love the band’s first two albums quite as much — a statement he immediately walked back once reminded those records are, in fact, beloved. “That probably averages out to being quite modest,” he offered. Maybe.
Where Wilder Mind did break new ground was lyrically. For a band once associated with emotional collapse and romantic wreckage, success complicated the narrative. Bigger stages, better lives, fewer obvious bruises. Did that make heartbreak harder to write? “I don’t think needing to find heartache is a good enough excuse to try and write songs,” Mumford said. “Good writers can write from whatever position they’re in — and empathize with other positions.”
Not every “I” in a Mumford & Sons song is autobiographical, and they don’t bother explaining which is which. “We just do it and hope it sounds cohesive,” Mumford said. Marshall took it further. “Seeking darkness as a writer is a really dangerous thing,” he said, citing advice from his grandmother. “Never seek darkness. It will come eventually. Life’s like that.”
That doesn’t mean the songs are sanitized. “No one’s got it good all the time,” Mumford said. “There’s always something wrong. Hopefully there’s something good too that makes it bearable.” When the writing is personal, it’s less about drama than release. “It’s cathartic,” Marshall said. “Getting stuff off your chest you can’t say in real life.”
Even outside projects fed that philosophy. The timing of Mumford’s involvement in the Basement Tapes sessions — particularly “Kansas City” — overlapped with Wilder Mind’s release, briefly confusing the narrative of reinvention. Mumford wasn’t bothered. “We love all our children,” he said. “I was proud to be involved. We always encourage each other to collaborate, to do different things. It’s like an open marriage.”
Marshall didn’t miss a beat. “Open marriages are always the most successful marriages.”
Steamboat tour pending.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
