Marcus Mumford Talks Solo Album, the Stories Behind It

If you’ve been reading COTR blogs for a while, peeked at staff bios, looked at more than 4 of my tweets, or otherwise engaged with me for more than 8 minutes, you know that I am a devoted, unapologetic fan of Mumford & Sons (or, as I started calling them and cannot stop, Mumf & Bois). I won’t go into the anxiety I experienced over the past year or so waiting to find out if they would ever release more music after the departure of their beloved Banjo Boi; the important part is that Marcus Mumford is releasing a solo album, Winston Marshall is changing minds and hearts, and the band is not dead.

All that said, it is with the utmost bias and personal investment that I bring you the details of Mumford’s recent interview with GQ magazine about his upcoming album, [self-titled].

First of all, woof.

Second of all, anyone who has bothered listening to Mumford’s music will be well aware that he is a gifted poet and wordsmith (if not occasionally bordering on the cliché). So to read this interview and get an insight into the two singles of his forthcoming album– “Cannibal” and “Grace”– is. . . impactful. In that I’ve been extremely emotional and moody about it all evening, and if you listen to those songs with the contents of the interview in mind, you’ll understand why.

And here I leave our characteristic sass at the door, because what follows is not for me to poke fun at (even if Mumford chooses to– it’s his story, not mine).

“Cannibal” . . . would become the first single from what would become Mumford’s first solo record. It’s about something awful that happened to Mumford, a thing he’s still trying to figure out how to talk about with other people. But the song is so direct, so pointed, so explicitly about what it’s about—“I can still taste you and I hate it / That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child and you knew it,” is how it begins—that there is no other place to start. “Like lots of people—and I’m learning more and more about this as we go and as I play it to people—I was sexually abused as a child,” Mumford told me during the first few minutes of the first real conversation we ever had. He was six years old at the time. “Not by family and not in the church, which might be some people’s assumption. But I hadn’t told anyone about it for 30 years.”

Including his mother, though somehow, in his head, he’d skipped over that fact when he played her “Cannibal.” “The power of the mind, man,” Mumford said ruefully. Anyway, she listened thoughtfully and left. “Couple days later,” Mumford said, she came back: “ ‘Can I ask what that song’s about?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s about the abuse thing.’ She was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ So once we get through the trauma of that moment for her, as a mother, hearing that and her wanting to protect and help and all that stuff, it’s objectively f*cking hilarious to tell your mom about your abuse in a f*cking song, of all things.”

And this is the nature of trauma, of childhood itself, of that moment when your life veers suddenly toward something scary or sad or indescribable—it shapes you forever, but it can also be generative, funny, random, a thing to write a song about. Grist for an artist who was already an artist. A story about nothing being a tidy story. Eventually, Mumford decided to make “Cannibal” the first song on the record. “I felt like it had to go first,” he told me. “I started sort of apologizing for it, in my head. But it’s like: That’s not right, either.” And so “Grace,” the song he ended up writing about the conversation he had with his mother about track one? That would become track two.

“Grace,” which includes the line, “Even though I never tell you everything / I could’ve sworn I dropped that bomb on you already.”

For some unbeknownst reason, I didn’t expect Mumford to go solo; in fairness to me, it seems he didn’t see it coming, either. Later in the interview, he talks about bringing these songs to the band:

Not long after his first conversations with the trauma specialist, Mumford began writing songs for, well, something—he didn’t know what. When he played the first two for his bandmates, they gently told him: maybe a solo record.

People on the internet are inexplicably quick to accuse Mumford of perpetuating “victim culture,” but his band mates didn’t see it that way. (For what it’s worth, neither do I.) To make art out of pain is something lovely– anyone who can look me in the eye and tell me they’ve never been moved by, say, a Van Gogh painting, is probably full of sh*t– and to be honest about what it is and what it means to anyone, let alone a global audience, is courageous.

[self-titled] is set to release on September 16th of this year, and tour dates have already been announced.