This time last year we had just confirmed to perform at the 2023 New Orleans Jazz Fest. We couldn’t be more excited. It’d be over 3 years that passed since our prior festival performance and Jazz Fest isn’t just any festival, this is one of those incredible events that sells out before they announce the lineup because people know and trust they’ll have a good time. Including us. So, frankly, we were just chuffed to be asked and said yes before we overthought it.

By January we met up in Los Angeles. Marcus was still touring self-titled, Ted had a new baby at home and I was, well, keeping busy as best as I know how. We ate and drank and played music together in a living room / garage / recording studio kinda vibe: the three of us, some old songs, some new ideas, and it was really fun. There were moments that we felt like teenagers again, just getting excited about making music together, and somewhere in amongst that excitement we started to look at the year ahead. Festival offers were coming in, “will you come to Canada?”, “how about Stockholm?, “what would you say to 24 hours in Australia?!”…

Marcus Haney

All of it sounded fun, logistically idiotic for sure, but really it seemed like an opportunity for us to go and do what we love: which is essentially to be with you, and each other, playing our songs, experiencing this crazy, beautiful world and so much it has to offer.

So we said yes, and yes and yes.

By the time we walked on stage in NOLA, we had over 16 festivals ahead of us, dotted all over the place, in no order or route, but a journey that finished, relatively not that far away in Austin, Texas at ACL Fest in October.

Supposedly we played to over a million people this summer, and whilst that is truly impossible to comprehend and we couldn’t be more grateful, I think it was in the small, intimate human moments amongst all that scale that we remembered just how much we love that we get to do this…. Trombone Shorty’s entry line on that cover of House of the rising sun… sitting with some of our crew in a roof top bar in the middle of Madrid at sunset, the night before MadCool… Our sister, Maggie Rogers, jumping in to help create a new set list when I had my stupid accident in PEI, Canada… playing a new song A Capella in Martha’s Vineyard at Beach Road… and then again with Noah Kahan at ACL… sharing the stage… sharing the backstage… sharing the experience whenever, wherever and with whoever we can.

Marcus Haney

We have one of the most amazing teams a band could ask for, the touring musicians who share a stage with us every night are some of the most talented fuckers out there; our families, our makers and keepers, create the space and provide the support to allow us to do what we do, and for all of this we are grateful. And then there’s you, the reader of this rambling mailer, you are the other half of our conversation and, when we’re physically in the same space with you, that is more apparent and more real than ever. How you support us and our music is literally what keeps us going and without you there is no Mumford & Sons. So thank you.

Happy Holidays from all of us and we’ll see you somewhere, sometime next year. Here’s to 2024!

Ben, Marcus & Ted aka The Lads