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The name on the marquee at Fenway Park this summer was never supposed to last more than a few months.
That's the story Mumford & Sons told Bobby Bones on The BobbyCast, and they did not soften it. Asked where the name came from, the answer came back in two words.
"It's temporary."
Nineteen years later, that is still technically the plan.
"I drove past the pub where we met our old manager and we talked about the name, and we were like, well, let's just roll with Mumford & Sons for a bit," Ben Lovett said. "Because it's not like we're going to sell any records or tour internationally or anything like that. Because we were a pub band."
They were wrong about all three. The band has sold millions of records, won multiple Grammys, and is currently in the middle of a North American stadium run behind their sixth album, Prizefighter. They also never got around to picking a better name.
"We actually grew to love it," Lovett said.
The "& Sons" half — the bit that makes it sound like a hardware store that's been in the family since 1890 — came out of what the four of them were actually doing for a living at the time. They weren't a band. They were hired hands.
Why Mumford & Sons doesn't have a drummer
This is the part that explains the whole sound.
"It started to be around the collection of songs that Marcus had, and we were very used to backing up a songwriter," Lovett said. "And Marcus had always been a drummer in all of these session bands that we were in. So it was a novelty that Marcus was sort of stepping to the front of the stage and singing and playing the guitar."
Then the punchline: "And that's why we don't have a drummer."
The band's frontman was the drummer. When he walked to the front, nobody moved to the back to replace him — which is how a band ends up building its early records around a kick drum, a banjo and four people playing louder than a rhythm section.
They were a pub band. They were not a covers band.
Bobby Bones assumed "pub band" meant what "bar band" means in the States — cover songs, a tip jar, "Sweet Home Alabama" at closing time. Mumford corrected him.
"The spots we were playing, it was more like the '60s in New York, like the cafes where you'd come if you had a song," he said. "If you had a song, you could jump up and play it. And if it was good, you could play another one. So it's that kind of atmosphere that we grew up in."
It was not a lucrative model.
"There were a lot less people in the audience than if we'd done, like, 'Sweet Home Alabama,'" Lovett admitted. But he wasn't complaining: "It started us. Started small."
For the record — Bobby asked whether Mumford & Sons has ever, in nineteen years, played "Sweet Home Alabama."
"Good question. No. No, we haven't."
The pub band that still won't call itself a hit machine
The funny thing is how little the framing has changed. The band that assumed it would never sell a record still resists the word "hit," even now.
"We've never really had a hit," one of them said flatly, mid-conversation about which song crowds sing loudest back at them — a discussion that spanned three continents and three different answers.
Bobby pushed back, arguing that the definition changed: a hit today is cultural resonance, not a chart position. The band conceded the point, sort of.
"We for sure never had a chart-topping song," they said. "Easy to make the weird charts, though."
Hear the full conversation with Mumford & Sons on The BobbyCast on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.