A band with a plan
Their strategy — not that they'd ever call it that — begins with touring, and lots of it. As Lovett suggests, he and his bandmates more or less live on the road, performing crowd favorites and honing new material in a variety of settings across the globe, from tiny pub gigs (including several recent ones in Dublin) to roomy amphitheater concerts to the daylong mini-festivals it put on this summer in out-of-the-way American cities such as Dixon, Illinois, and Bristol, Virginia.
The band has been careful too with exposure, limiting interviews and television performances but encouraging easy access to its music. During the first week of "Babel's" release Mumford & Sons allowed listeners to stream the album for free on Spotify — something the online service said happened more than 8 million times.
A sense of belonging
Lovett singles out the group's performance with Bob Dylan at the 2011 Grammy Awards as a pivotal moment, and he's certainly not wrong: "Sigh No More" enjoyed its biggest-ever sales week in the days following the telecast.
"I think it introduced us to people who watch [awards] shows the way we grew up watching music on TV," he said. "It makes sense that it would widen our audience. But we weren't thinking about that at the time."
Indeed, all of this maneuvering seems secondary to the powerful sense of belonging the band's songs engender among its fans. Not unlike Adele, whose "21" was last year's bestselling album, Mumford & Sons offers a chance to stand up for hand-played music in an age of machine-made pop; it embodies the feel-good realism of people singing and playing instruments onstage.
And yet the group isn't didactic about its position, vastly increasing its appeal for listeners with no horse in the authenticity race. In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Marcus Mumford declined to describe the band's music as bluegrass or any other traditional form, saying, "We just call ourselves a rock band, really."
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