Mumford & Sons to Record New Album This Year

Mumford & Sons aren’t about to take it easy now that they’ve hit the big time. The band – who have sold over 300,000 copies of their debut album Sigh No More – are about to embark on their ambitious Railroad Revival Tour with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, and are already at work on their sophomore album.

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“We want to get the second album recorded this year, and we’re hoping to have gigged the record in before going to the studio,” keyboardist-accordionist Ben Lovett tells Rolling Stone. The band are planning to hit the studio later this year with Markus Dravs, the producer of Sigh No More. “I think we could perhaps record it ourselves, but we’d get lost in our own sorts,” Lovett says. “He’s really good at bringing a little bit of structure and order to very disorganized minds.”

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One of Lovett’s favorite new songs, “Lover of the Light,” is a dynamic, rocking song with lead singer Marcus Mumford on drums. “Some people have heard it, we’ve been playing it for about eight months now,” Lovett says. “I think that should go all the way through the next record, but ultimately we’re trying to write better and better songs, and songs that are truer to ourselves. And if we end up writing 10 to 15 songs better than that one, it will just have to sit on the B Side of the tape somewhere.”

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The band was especially productive in January when they reconvened in Nashville after a holiday break. “We wrote six tracks in a week when we there on a farm,” Lovett says. “We just played every day and shared with each other the different songs we’d been writing on our time away from each other. It was quite an interesting way to catch up – you know, songs were the best way we could express ourselves when we hadn’t been with each other. It was like, ‘Ah, what have you been up to?’ and then it’s like you hear their song as an anecdote.”