Welcome everyone to So DeJoker on songwriting, episode 315.

Hope you're all well.

It's Simon and Brian here, and joining us today are two members of a Grammy and Ivan Avella-winning English band,

whose meteoric rise in the late 2000s and early 2010s saw them go from West London New Folk combo

to global arena-straddling behemoth in just a few short

years.

They recently dropped Prize Fighter, their sixth studio album and their fourth to top the UK

charts, a mere 11 months after their last LP Rushmere.

It was co-produced with long-time pal, the Nationals Aaron Destner, and mostly recorded at his

Longpond studio in

upstate New York, and boasts a stellar cast of guest stars including Hosier, Gracie Abrams,

Justin Vernon, Gigi Perez and Chris Stapleton. We're delighted to welcome Mumford and Sons, Marcus,

Marcus, Marcus and Ben Lovett to the show. Mumford and Sons formed in London in 2007,

although frontman Marcus and keyboardist Ben actually met at school in Wimbledon when they were eight years old and started playing music

together around the age of 12. They met banjo player Winston Marshall and bassist Ted Dwayne in their late

teens, and all four were part of a loose collective of musicians, which also included the

legs of Nora in the Whale and Laura Marling, and often assembled in the basement club Bosons Locker on the King's Road

in Chelsea. The foursome began playing and writing songs together and gradually coalesced

into an entity of their own. Owing in part to their tireless gigging schedule, they quickly

built a strong following and eventually won a deal with Island Records in the summer of 2009.

Long playing debut, Sino Moore, released the following autumn and produced by Marcus Draves,

yielded hits like Little Lion Man and the Cave, won the Brit for album of the year, and eventually went multi-platinum.

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