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Artist News
Mumford & Sons experimenting live to make “great” album
By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 10 July 2017
Shut up, Mumford & Sons could put out an album tomorrow if they wanted. It would be rubbish, but they could do it. But they want to put out a “great” album. Make Mumford & Sons Great Again, I say.
“I feel like we’ve got a really good chunk of the record done, although there’s still a lot more to do”, guitarist Winston Marshall told that NME. “If you’re going to write an album of ten songs, our attitude is that you need to write 30 and choose ten fucking good ones. We could probably put out a not-so-good album right now, but it’s better to wait and put out a great one”.
The band are going back to testing out new songs on live audiences before recording their final versions, added Marcus Mumford. This being a process largely dropped on last album, ‘Wilder Mind’.
“We’ve been playing a couple of new songs a night on this tour”, said Mumford. “We’ve gone back to the mentality we had when we first started out, when every song was new to the audience and we’d get away with experimenting on them almost every night – working out what wasn’t quite right, which lyrics didn’t work, how 60 people in a pub reacted to certain things.
In an era when every misstep finds its way onto YouTube, this is a risk, he added: “People can share songs online so much more easily these days, so that experimentation is a little riskier than before, but we try not to be too precious about it”.
