Musician

Being a bass player in a band without a drummer for seven, eight years has been kind of weird.

I've always thought of faith as an acknowledgment of not being the biggest thing in the universe.

I don't know many artists who've managed to go a career without bringing these things up. Saying the word 'God,' 'Jesus' - it happens in a million rock songs.

We don't sing about eating local produce or growing beards or anything like that. It's funny to find yourself in a position where people associate you with things that are completely arbitrary to your songs.

A lot of the time, if you go into an arena, they're pretty uninspiring. But we try to create an atmosphere.

It's impossible to tell how you're perceived. I think it's important not to think about it too much, because it really means nothing. Some people think we're a rock band, and that's ridiculous, and the idea of us being a folk band - you sit in a pub in Ireland and hear those guys play, and you're like, 'Yeah, we're definitely not a folk band.'

We started off as Marcus Mumford, which is our singer's name. But then it very quickly became apparent it wasn't really a one-man thing: it was indeed a band. We wanted to give the impression of a family business, and we just liked the ring of Mumford & Sons.

You can't really opt into something you don't believe in.

As soon as we started playing sports arenas, we thought how great it would be if we could instead play to 25,000 people in our own way - a way we can control it so there's not all kinds of company branding around the show - and do it in a way that celebrates the community.

We don't want to be as big as Oasis!

We're obviously a London band, and British at heart.

You can't just repeat. It's valueless. So we - we're really keen to challenge ourselves. I suppose a byproduct of that will be challenging our fans a bit as well.

When we made the first album, it was meant to be a snapshot of Mumford & Sons in 2009.

We always try to make each record a snapshot of the band at that time.

We have this spirit that's just uncrushable.

I was a bass guitarist first before I started playing double bass - and I only started playing it because my teacher said I'd get twice as much work, as there's not enough players out there.

When you write on the road, you are restricted to the instruments around you, whereas in the studio, you can plug anything in and try it.

We have big limitations by not having a drummer. It instantly informs a lot of our musical decisions when it comes to writing. What we end up coming out with is not very cerebral music.

Our spiritual home is definitely the U.K., but we have such a breadth of influence, and America's a huge part of that, as I think it is for most bands.

There's a point with every record we've made that the album starts to assert its identity, and I think that's kind of what happened with 'The Wolf.'