JT has worked with the BRIT winner on a song for Coen Bros new movie…

16:37, Tuesday, 26 February 2013 via MTV

Justin Timberlake has confirmed he’s recorded a collaboration with the lead singer of Mumford & Sons for his new flick.

The Mirrors singer revealed he’s teamed-up with Marcus Mumford on a tune for his latest movie, Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, which also stars Mumford’s wife, actress Carey Mulligan.

Revealing the news during an interview with Capital FM, Timberlake stated: “OK I can tell you this. There’s a Coen brothers film coming out soon that I was lucky enough to work with Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan.

“And coincidentally I did work with Marcus Mumford on the soundtrack, so I became very good friends with them.”

The former NSYNC star continued: “Marcus and myself, we all kind of worked on the music together and I don’t know any other world where we would have the opportunity to collaborate like that but it was so much fun.

“So not only will that be a great movie, but the music to it will be fantastic.”

The movie is due for release later this year.

From Billboard.com
December 14, 2012 9:00 EST 

Folk/rock quartet Mumford & Sons earn top Rock Album applause for a second consecutive year, although with a different leading title than last year. Babel is 2012’s No. 1 Rock Album, highlighted by a debut week of 600,000 copies sold (Oct. 13), marking the largest sales frame for a rock act since 2008. In 2011, the group topped the year-end Rock Albums survey with Sigh No More. The act is the first since Billboard began crowning a yearly top Rock Album in 2006 to manage back-to-back No. 1 rankings.
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In addition to its No. 1 Rock Album ranking, Babel also takes the No. 7 spot on the overall Billboard 200 Best Albums of 2012 chart, No. 3 on the Digital Albums chart, and No. 1 on the Alternative, Folk, and Independent charts. Slow-burning sensation Sigh No More still ranks high on the charts three years after its release, coming in at No. 29 on the Billboard 200 Best Albums of 2012 chart, No. 13 on the Digital Albums chart, No. 2 on the Folk Albums chart (effectively giving Mumford & Sons the top two albums in the category), and No. 7 on both the Rock and Alternative charts.

From RadioToday:
12/12/12 - 14:22

One of the biggest bands in the world Mumford and Sons are set to take over the breakfast show on XFM Manchester for one day only.

They’ll host the show on Thursday 20th December where the boys will be getting all festive and celebrating their year of music.

Regular host Tim Cocker will take the day off, leaving [Winston] and Ted from the band popped to look after the show.

XFM Manchester, owned by Global Radio, is local for Manchester during breakfast and afternoons, with the rest of the schedule broadcast from XFM London.

From The Belfast Telegraph:
Wednesday, 28 November 2012 

Mumford & Sons are working on their third album.

Winston Marshall, the banjo player in the hit folk rock band, has confirmed that their future release is already in production.

The new record’s framework is in place and fans can expect to hear tracks from it soon.

“Will we wait years for the next album? F**k, no. You heard it here first. We’ve just started working on new songs, got a rehearsal studio,” Winston explained to NME magazine. “They’re bones of songs, but really exciting bones. Sturdy bones.”

Mumford & Sons have had huge success in 2012, following the release of their second record Babel. Winston discussed some of the highlights of the year, including performing at the Hollywood Bowl.

“We played some f**king cool places this year - we did a gig in Kentucky, on the oldest working steamboat. The Hollywood Bowl gigs were special. On the first night [of two] we were so over excited we rushed through the first half of the set,” Winston remembered. “If Marcus [Mumford, singer] goes really fast, I can’t keep up and everyone realises I can’t actually play the banjo.”

Babel hit stores in September and has thrust the band into the limelight in America, where it sold 600,000 copies in the first week of release.
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Click here to read this article at The Belfast Telegraph. 

Thursday 15 November 2012 11.50 EST
Words: Tom Lamont
Photo: Barry J. Holmes
From The Guardian:

Soundcheck for the band, today, takes place at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. It is late afternoon and while the arena’s 17,000 outdoor seats are still empty the four members of Mumford & Sons – prospering British folk band, in the middle of a long tour of Australia, the US and the UK, their newly released album Babel a smash on all fronts – wander to centre stage. First singer and guitarist Marcus Mumford, wearing a black suit, then bassist Ted Dwane, in leather bomber and T-shirt. Next bearded banjo player Winston Marshall, his blue flannel shirt hanging loose, and pianist Ben Lovett, wrapped in a woollen coat.

Mumford begins to perform, a murmured cover of a country song, and as the others join in the rhythm of the music gets to them. Dwane lowers his body at the waist, knees out. Watching from the stands I wonder if it’s a fleeting thing, an itch or a bit of back ache … But Mumford, infected, begins a fancy kickstep. Soon Marshall is doing an elaborate foot-to-foot jig, and then they’re all bounding around. Shoulder dips. Yee-ha faces. It’s an impromptu hoedown.

Having spent the day in the company of this thoughtful, friendly, uncommonly levelheaded band – charmed, completely – a protective part of me sort of wishes they wouldn’t hoedown. Four polite Englishmen in their middle 20s, feigning like firewater drunks in a Eugene O’Neill play: it’s exactly the stuff that makes their detractors groan. Since forming in 2007 Mumford & Sons have hard-toured their way to a vast market for throaty folk that’s strong on banjo and bass drum. They have released two enormous albums. But, wow, do they take some knocks back home.

“They look like fucking Amish people,” Liam Gallagher said last year. “As rock and roll as a blue rinse,” was the the Sun’s more recent take. An October blogpost on the NME’s website, entitled Why Do People Hate Mumford & Sons So Much?, quoted extensively from a Facebook page called I Hate Mumford & Sons. They’re inauthentic, runs the general complaint. They went to fee-paying London schools and now they’re all about heels and waistcoats and hoedowns.

What do Mumford & Sons think? “England’s just very cynical. Like I am. Like we all are,” says Marshall. “I think we’re all guilty of it as British citizens,” says Mumford, “if something gets big we go … ugh.”

There is a plausible argument that this band are the most successful in the world right now – Babel shifted 600,000 copies in its first week in the US, making it the fastest-seller of the year. The album before that, 2009’s Sigh No More, went multiple platinum. And here they are, commendably (you might say perversely) taking a share of the blame for the stick they get, on national-character grounds. “We get accused of inauthenticity because we play the instruments we play,” says Marshall, whose furious banjo work probably prompts the most carping. But he points to the example of legendary British guitarist Peter Green. “He’s from Bethnal Green – and he’s this fucking incredible blues guitarist. Nothing fucking authentic about that, right? But actually there is. He loves it. It’s what he’s good at. It’s not like he’s saying he’s from the Delta. It’s not like we’re saying anything like that.”

“The authenticity thing has never been an issue for me,” says Mumford. “Not since I came to the realisation that Dylan, who’s probably my favourite artist ever, the richest artist for me, didn’t give a shit about authenticity. He changed his name. And modelled himself on Woody Guthrie. And lied to everyone about who he was.”

Mumford is outfitted today like his hero, the worn dark suit ideally Dylan, so too the black hat deep-positioned on his head. Backstage at the Hollywood Bowl this hat will get a compliment from a bystander and Mumford will explain that its appearance is the result of many weeks campaigning. His wife, the actor Carey Mulligan, took some persuading on it …

Mumford and Mulligan married in April, and she is here at the venue today, merrily flitting about the wings, wearing a jumper with a large letter M on it. Mumford is wary about his private life, and prefers not to speak on the record about Mulligan. I relate the following story as to how the couple got together from other reports. They knew each other as kids and were briefly pen pals before falling out of touch. Then in 2011 the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, a mutual friend, reintroduced them and within a year they were engaged. At their wedding in the spring Mumford’s father, a vicar, conducted the service.

Given that the frontman’s parents are prominent Christians (Jon and Ele Mumford founded the UK wing of the evangelical “church planting” organisation Vineyard Church), and also that the band’s lyrics feature ample spiritual deliberation, it’s no great surprise that Mumford & Sons are sometimes considered a Christian band. Marshall and Dwane tell me they were approached by a fan, not so long ago, who wanted to know if this was how they defined themselves. “We said we’re not all Christian, so we can’t be a Christian band,” Marshall says. “We’re not all religious,” Dwane says. “In fact none of us are, really. We, er, we have a full spectrum of beliefs.” Marshall, I sense, is at the skeptical end of this spectrum. He appends another story about a different encounter, six months ago, when he was asked by a fan if they could pray together. Marshall recalls his awkward refusal: “Erm. Sorry dude.”

They’re one of those bands who pinch bits out of books to texture their songs – from the Bible and from elsewhere, their first album launching with a quote from Much Ado About Nothing, for example, and the newer record featuring a borrowed line from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. They’re charged with posh-lad pretentiousness as a result, though I don’t know it’s all that uncommon for bands to plunder snatches of lyrics from wider culture. Before meeting the band I asked Mantel about the steal from Wolf Hall (Mumford having admitted to it in a BBC radio interview) and the novelist told me: “Of course they’re welcome. I have millions of lines.” If our incumbent Booker winner has a sense of humour about it, my instinct is that the rest of us should too.

As for the biblical stuff: “I don’t know many artists who’ve managed to go a career without bringing these things up,” says Dwane. “Saying the word ‘God’, ‘Jesus’ – it happens in a million rock songs.” Nonetheless some strange theories have been floated. For example that Mumford & Sons’ lyrics closely mirror the writings of the Pope (the Catholic Herald, 2010). Or that the band’s ploy might be to “get a following and then reveal the great truth later” (the Daily Mirror, 2010).If the band are working to a secret evangelical agenda then Marshall, at least, has got his doctrines confused. Today he hands me a leaflet he has picked up that advertises access to “the wisdom of the universe”. Given that “there’s fuck all else to do in LA”, he says, he spent the morning wandering the L Ron Hubbard museum in West Hollywood. “I’m looking for answers,” he says, pulling a wild-eyed face that slowly gives to a grin.

Their music being so earnest, so bloody grave, I’m surprised to find Mumford & Sons such light company. Interview bands who have made it big and you get to sense which are only good at containing monstrous self-love, or appalling self-doubt, or a fizzing mixture of the two, for the exact duration of a promotional commitment (and sometimes a shorter period than that). You also get an idea as to which have kept their humour and some hold on normality.

The Spice Girls ballad 2 Become 1 gets a layered, four-man rendition while Mumford & Sons kill time before a photoshoot. The irreverent Marshall is described by Lovett, accurately, as “always looking like he’s won a competition to stand next to the band”. Mumford tells a story about someone squealing in recognition, not long ago, while he was waiting in line at a cash machine. His hand automatically went for the autograph pen … In fact he was being told he looked exactly like Alec Baldwin. (There is a striking resemblance.)

They’re funny with me and generous with their time and, who knows, it might be because way back it was a press interview that accidentally got Mumford’s songwriting career underway. He was about 20 at the time and a dropout from Edinburgh University (“not very popular” there) when he got session work as a drummer with Laura Marling. She was then a little known singer-songwriter whose career was about to take off, and in a small London studio Mumford recorded the drum track for Marling’s breakthrough album, Alas I Cannot Swim. When Marling was called away to do interviews that day, Mumford was left in a studio booth for an hour and a half, where he sat and wrote White Blank Page, later a central track on Sigh No More and a real heart-wringer, all about romantic frustration.

Throughout our conversation, Mumford talks of Marling only as an admired fellow musician – but anyone who follows these sorts of artists knows that Mumford and Marling became a couple for a time, from some point after Alas I Cannot Swim was finished until about 2010. He speaks fondly of their shared musical beginnings. “We toured a lot, just me and her. Have you seen Force 10 From Navarone? I was like the bomb expert, Miller, had my little box of tricks – [drum]sticks, a mandolin. We used an accordion case as a kick-drum, made snares out of paper stuck on tables. Laura would never say anything on stage so I’d do all the chatting. That got my stage banter sharpened.”

Mumford approached Marling’s manager, Adam Tudhope, with White Blank Page and a few other tracks he had written, and Tudhope took him on. The band gathered around Mumford from there. Lovett was an old friend from St Paul’s school in west London, Marshall he had first met as a teenager then reencountered in Edinburgh; Dwane they all knew through crossover work with Marling.

Under the new name Mumford & Sons (a bit of nu-folk whimsy: no blood relations here), their earliest gigs, remembers Lovett, “were awful. But we were energetic, and ambitious, and gave everything we could, and that got us a long way.” The band toured a great deal from the start, and have never really reined in that early zeal for booking new dates. By Lovett’s count they’ve done 10 separate tours of the US alone. Relentless touring has been a constant through all sorts of milestones: the release of an early EP on Chess Club Records, signing with Island Records here and Glassnote in America; Sigh No More being nominated for a Mercury Prize, and winning a Brit; then a storming TV appearance at the 2011 Grammys, where they played with Bob Dylan, pushing album sales past 1m in the US and being invited to play the White House in March.

Today at the Hollywood Bowl the news is still very fresh that Babel has repeated the feat: a million copies sold in America, only this time much quicker, about six weeks after release. There are bands out there who would find this a reasonable excuse to open the champagne. To fill the nearest pool with it, for backflips. When I mention the new achievement to Dwane, he hasn’t heard about it. “But no, that’s awesome.” Mumford’s clueless too. “But no, that’s great, that’s great.” The singer showed more animation telling me about a last-minute decision to substitute Everton’s Marouane Fellaini out of his Fantasy Football team.

A casual disinterest in sales figures – is this for real? Lovett is probably more industry-minded than the others (away from Mumford & Sons, he is the co-founder of an independent label, Communion, which has recent Mercury nominees Michael Kiwanuka and Ben Howard on its roster) and he has heard about Babel’s sales triumph. But he says: “A lot of bad music sells a million copies, I don’t think it’s a good litmus test for whether things are going well. I don’t think there’s anything good that can come out of knowing. In the same way that we don’t pay any attention to any of the negative stuff that comes our way, it’s just as important not to pat ourselves on the back when commercial success is being talked about.”

The band, he tells me, want to have the freedom to evolve as they make a third album, a fourth. Also to be able to do small-venue tours as well as big ones. “And even just registering [Babel’s sales] you would naturally, subconsciously, be striving to continue to go that same way. The next album, the next couple of albums after this, we know that it’s going to take a musical turn.”

I touch on this with Mumford, and we discuss how his songwriting might alter given his recent wedding to Mulligan. The band’s most arresting tracks, for me, are the lovelorn ones, such as White Blank Page – and what effect will a happy marriage have on that? Mumford gives a small chuckle, and concedes I might have a point. “We had a little writing session the other day. The other guys were coming up with more ideas than I was.”

I ask Dwane what the new material sounds like. “Sort of glory-days Elton John,” he says. I ask Marshall, who says “it sounds a bit like the National, and a bit like the Band, without doing either of them justice”. They tell me other things I’m not allowed to write, including news of a change in instrument infrastructure that should quieten a few groans.

Personally I could handle Mumford & Sons working in something Bill Withers-ish, too, if their performance at the end of soundcheck is anything to go by. The sun has by now gone down, the gig only hours away, and an army of event staff are moving through the 17,000 seats to make final preparations. Some nod their heads as the band play a cover of Lean On Me, quite beautifully, into the near-empty arena.

No hoedown interlude on this one, but after a verse of Withers’ song Mumford starts messing with the lyrics. He baits the sound crew: “Lean on me / while you figure out / which button does what.” And then he teases his bandmates, or seems to, about the unlikeliness of their current position, these four Londoners making American-flavoured folk and pretty well conquering an industry with it.

“Lean on me / while we figure out / what we’re doing here anyway / It’s all a big accident / Lean on me …”
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Click here to read the article at The Guardian.