The cultural zeitgeist of the “stomp, clap, hey” era of 2010s folk music was only beginning when, on a misty night in Ireland my sophomore year of college, a local cover band took the stage at the pub I had stumbled into with my cohort of American university students. The band started to play: a folky banjo tune that built slowly before a burst. Some in the crowd around me sang along, familiar with the song.
“What is this?” I shouted to a friend over the swelling volume.
She hollered back, “Have you heard of Mumford and Sons?”
I surface this memory with ease only because Mumford and Sons continued to follow me through my college years, their songs a soundtrack to the firming contours of my maturing soul. That banjo strum echoes now at the crest of my midlife as their newest album, “Prizefighter,” accompanies my days with a lyrical and acoustic resonance once reserved for years spent dreaming of the life I live now. Their music has served as a companion and memory keeper across seasons of my life, their most recent album reflecting back to me the arc of my adulthood.
During my undergraduate years at the University of Scranton, I would make my way to class or the library with “Sigh No More” and later “Babel” swirling through my ears, wired headphones plugged into my yellow iPod (can you imagine?). Much has been written elsewhere on the religious imagination of Mumford and Sons, both recently and in their genesis days (see here and here for two of several fine examples). Folks with an ear attuned to hearing hallowed echoes of spiritual sonority in the everyday wouldn’t have to listen deeply or parse apart the poetry of Mumford and Sons’ lyrics to notice hums of something holy.
Song titles including “The Cave” and “Roll Away Your Stone” evoked theological themes; subtle spiritual motifs surfaced in references to “grace,” “beauty,” “belief” and “betrayal,” articulating a longing for the transcendent that carried across albums. Their music was everywhere during these formative years of mine — the cafeteria, the bar, the university’s retreat house — shaping me in ways subtle and significant as both a student and a steadfast, starry-eyed dreamer of the person I was shaping up to be.
Among the most beloved tracks from Mumford and Sons’ debut “Sigh No More” album is “Awake My Soul.” The lyrics are laden with spiritual substance, among them, a swaying elegy of mortal reckoning:
In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will dieAnd where you invest your love, you invest your lifeIn these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will dieAnd where you invest your love, you invest your life
This theme of fleeting physicality and enduring devotion was not only swirling in my ears. The student union at my alma mater bore an imposing quote from a 16th-century Jesuit poet above the main entrance: “Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live.” I passed beneath this engraving nearly every day, the verse keeping vigil over me as I crossed the threshold into emerging adulthood.
I held these sister sentiments of place and presence close as I stumbled through those years, fumbling but finding myself along the way. After bouncing around between majors for a precariously long time, I finally surrendered to my love for my theology courses. While my vision for what I might do with that degree remained opaque, I hoped wherever I landed would offer space for big questions and deep conversations — spaces where I felt alive during my college years. I traveled, I volunteered, I followed a sense of adventure, I felt like I belonged. And upon graduating, my greatest fear was that I would lose opportunities to follow these passions when muzzled by PTO and living far from friends. Who would I be, I wondered, on the other side of my college years? Where would I invest my love and, therefore, my life? I feared fading into the shadows of a lukewarm livelihood; I ached for the dream of a life that made real the dreams I had and labored after. I wanted to not simply breathe, but to love and ergo live.
I graduated and lived into this wondering, making good on some of the promises I made to myself, animating the hopes I had in my younger years. I wanted to see the world, I wanted to write, I wanted a life of meaningful connections and impactful work. And some relationships endured; some plans came to fruition.
And Mumford and Sons continued to make music. They left their banjo behind for a bit, departing from their familiar sound. I, too, left behind pieces of myself as new versions of my vocation demanded a barter of who I was for who I might be. I moved far from my hometown, some friendships succumbing to the distance. I wound up in graduate school studying something entirely unexpected. Meanwhile, “There Will Be Time,” from their extended play, “Johannesburg,”was the first dance song at my wedding. I remember hearing the song for the first time on a weekend trip with friends, the memory itself a grace. “It’s all that I am; it’s all that I have,” the chorus lilts, surfacing again the themes of presence and mortality that had tided me through the years. And again, the song builds to burst: I danced so hard on my hot August wedding day, I lost my shoes entirely.
Now, my path has taken many turns, all graced even if some were unexpected. I’ve endured loss, celebrated joy, accomplished much, been held by many, been blessed beyond the wildest fantasies I could have ever had for myself when I was closer to the girl I was in Ireland, to the girl with wired headphones in her ears, than the woman I am today.
So when Mumford and Sons picked the banjo back up for their recently released “Prizefighter,” their strumming, more subtle now, plucked at my nostalgia. “I was a bank robber, I was Superman,” Marcus Mumford croons on “I’ll Tell You Everything,” offering a confession, an examen, a reckoning with an interior inventory. Their sound doesn’t quite swell as it once did. Neither do my longings — and not because of any ennui or surrender; rather, these themes that have endured across the years are steadier, more deeply habituated, more muscular than they were when I was young. I’m more self-aware; it’s not that I’m any less audacious, I simply don’t require such risk to prove myself. The urgency I felt in early adulthood has steadied, though my hopes — to see the world, to bring good into it — endure.
I think back on who I was when Mumford and Sons first scored my days, and if I could, I’d return to that girl for just a few minutes and tell her that I still wrestle with big questions and find space for meaningful conversation, that I still write and travel, that it hasn’t all been perfect, and certainly I haven’t been either, but I’ve carried what’s mattered most within me all along. I think where I’ve invested my love has made for a life she’d be proud of, or would at the very least, find interesting.
I think of this when I go about my day with “Prizefighter” playing in the background: sound streaming from my cellphone connecting wirelessly to my car radio as I settle into the driver’s seat after strapping in my toddler. The banjo strums as I live into the promises I made my younger self, as I make peace with the ones I severed.
“Conversation with my Son” lilts, “Love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.” I used to wonder who I would become on the other side of it all: education, vocation, love, loss. I’d like to think my crooked life has been shaped by how I chose to invest my crooked love. I didn’t understand back when I first heard those words how costly and how ordinary that would be. I pluck at the strings of my nostalgia; I strum the dreams I still have. I understand it a little more now: enough to know that this life, imperfect and astonishing, threaded with grace and regret, is where I am choosing, again and again, to place my love. And so, to live.