Mumford and Sons take the Prizefighter Tour to Wrigley Field next. Dierks Bentley plays the Walmart AMP on Friday
By Novena Littlejohn | Photos by Troy Littledeer 📸: @kituwahpunk
ROGERS, Ark. — The heat hadn’t broken when Marcus Mumford walked out at 9:15 and hit the stage electric — not plugged-in electric, charged electric, the kind of energy that decides a show’s temperature in the first ten seconds.
By the back half of the set he’d left the stage entirely, cut through the floor, and climbed the lawn to the cheap seats without dropping a note — the kind of move a band makes when it has decided the people farthest from the stage paid the same emotional price as the people up front and ought to get the same show.
That’s what this was. Mumford came up busking the London underground and folk clubs, and the band built its first records on a few voices and a kick drum. The core that took the stage with him in Rogers is the one that made the name: Marcus Mumford on lead vocals, guitar and drums; Ben Lovett on keys and vocals; Ted Dwane on upright bass and vocals. They walked into an 11,000-seat shed off Interstate 540 with a full production behind them and refused to let the production become the point. The Prizefighter Tour is the biggest thing Mumford and Sons have ever carried on the road. Rogers got the version that still acts like it’s playing a room you could shout across.
They opened with “Run Together,” then went straight into “Babel” and “Little Lion Man” — the old kick-drum stomp that made their name, played without apology to a crowd that knew every word. “White Blank Page” came fourth. Mumford mentioned afterward, almost as an aside, that he’d heard Taylor Swift once covered it, then held the pause just long enough to watch the room decide how to feel about that. The Knicks came up once. He promised, tongue in cheek, to spare everyone the score updates somebody apparently insisted on the night before, and offered to talk politics instead. He did neither. The set was the better for it.
The catalog ran deep and unsentimental. Eight from Prizefighter. Six from Sigh No More. Four from Babel. A horn section thickened the songs that wanted weight and stayed out of the ones that didn’t. Then the band walked to a second stage and stripped the whole apparatus down to nothing — one microphone, three voices, one guitar nobody bothered to plug in — and asked the crowd to go quiet for “The Boxer,” the Simon and Garfunkel cover. The crowd went quiet. And in the silence the band had just built, the traffic on I-540 came drifting in from the dark, the sound of the interstate that runs past the venue, the sound of everywhere else trying to get somewhere. Nobody planned that. It was the best thing that happened all night.
That’s the thing folk music never stopped knowing how to do. Put a few voices together, ask a room full of strangers to hold still, and let the noise of the world press in at the edges. Mumford and Sons spent the better part of two and a half hours proving they can fill a shed the size of a parking lot. Then they spent three minutes proving they didn’t need to.
The encore closed on “Conversation With My Son (Gangsters and Angels).”
Mumford and Sons take the Prizefighter Tour to Wrigley Field next. Dierks Bentley plays the Walmart AMP on Friday.