Mumford and Sons Record Exchange-Program EP With Indian Musicians

Posted on Dec 2nd 2010 2:00PM by Mike Ayers
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Henry S. Dziekan III, Getty Images

Getting a bit tired of spinning Grammy-nominated Mumford and Sons' debut 'Sigh No More'? Probably not, but there's still good news for fans of the British folk rockers. On Dec. 7, the band will release a four-song EP, an effort they recorded around this time last year in India with their pal, British songstress Laura Marling and an Indian folk music collective known as the Dharohar Project. The genesis of the collaboration started from a "cultural exchange" program set up by the British Arts Council, with the resulting effort blending Mumford and Sons and Marling's tunes within the Dharohar's songs.

"The idea was to collaborate. It wasn't so much as to take our songs and have people play on them," Mumford and Sons' keyboardist Ben Lovett tells Spinner. "We spent the first day just playing songs to each other. There was a huge language barrier; they didn't speak any English and we didn't speak any of their dialect."

The EP starts off with the Marling-penned 'Devil's Spoke,' which fuses her song with a song called 'Sneh Ko Marg' and alternates between English and Indian dialects. The tempo flows through a heavily saturated sitar sound, which Lovett reveals produced one of the best moments of the few days they spent recording.

Watch Mumford and Sons on the Interface

"We were trying to get on a similar page about the meaning of the songs," he says. "The song that Laura wrote, 'Devil's Spoke,' they had a song that had a melodic riff in it. It matched how what Laura originally wanted it. There's something quite magical about that."

Lovett describes the recording as something unlike they'd ever previously tackled, which would make sense -- many of the instruments the Dharohar Project used had been passed down from family to family for nearly 500 years, along with the songs as well.

"Some of the songs have old folk stories and melodies passed down in particular families," Lovett says. "All the equipment in Delhi was much different than what I was used to working with in London. We had to fly in a whole bunch of gear in from Mumbai. We set up about 18 microphones in a room to capture what was happening in the equivalent of a high school gymnasium."

For the casual Mumford fan, these four songs might not be the next 'Little Lion Man,' but they certainly display not only how their songs -- and Marling's -- can fit into a new, Eastern sound with relative ease, not to mention their willingness to step out of their comfort zone in order to further their own musical understanding.

Watch Mumford and Sons' 'Little Lion Man' Video