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Mumford & Sons: In These Bodies, We Will Live. In These Bodies, We Will Die.

In Hoboken, Bristol and at the Bonnaroo Arts & Music festival two years ago, I was onstage for the band’s set. Seeing that many people suddenly spring into motion when the songs’ kick drum hits isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen. Part of the reason that so many people move to the music is that it doesn’t require a fan to know how to dance in some cool way: Clapping your hands, stomping your foot, bobbing your head or simply jumping up and down all work. It’s why you’ll see as many jocks as you will waify girls in sundresses and flip-flops at the shows.

“He said he got our band when he was listening to it at the gym,” says Marshall of what producer Markus Dravs told the band when he approached them with an offer to produce their debut. When Dravs, who’s also worked with Arcade Fire and Coldplay, first met them at a café in Liverpool, he said that he wanted the album to be able to stand up next to a hip-hop record. “That’s what made us want to work with him as a producer,” says Lovett.

Sigh No More, released in February 2010 in the U.S., quickly took on a life of its own as it effortlessly dropped into a wave of acoustic music that was beginning to sweep across the U.S., led by artists such as The Avett Brothers and Gillian Welch after an initial swell of interest with 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.

“Expectations are something they didn’t have and we didn’t have,” says Glass of Sigh No More. “We wanted to do it right. I promised them a few things: We’d go slow, which we did. We’d treat it with respect and we wouldn’t hype it.” (A week before we went to press, Sigh No More was No. 20 on the Billboard 200 chart more than two years after its release.)

Word-of-mouth and a love of touring were all the band needed to hit a critical mass. As album and radio charts began attesting around the world, Mumford & Sons was a global phenomenon—not just an American or British one. They played 27 festivals around the globe in the summer of 2010. The next year they did 32.

No sooner did the band begin touring in support of Sigh No More than its members began answering questions about a new album. “It’s the perils of the Internet age,” argues Dwane. “We were on the road, testing songs— half-written songs, sometimes in front of small audiences. It’s the way we work—the way we enjoy writing and developing our musical ideas—and now it ends up on YouTube and millions of people can see it and ask you questions about. It’s quite a different climate for us.”

If the climate had changed outside the studio, then it was an equally new experience inside once the band began the process of recording Babel.

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The day before the Stopover, Mumford and Dwane are sitting on a couch backstage. A ping-pong table echoes nearby and one of the town’s two mayors has just left after some handshaking and small talk.

“I’m going to speak for myself slightly, but we went into record the second album in the same studio with the same producer as the first album and I think we expected it to be a similar process,” begins Dwane. “To think that two records would ever be made the same way was very naïve.”

A few of the differences: The band cut Babel over an eight-month period in between tours versus one month. With Babel, the band tracked some of the performances live in the studio. (Something Lovett says “we struggled with at times.”) With Sigh No More, the group wrote one song while they were in the studio and went in with 11 complete ones; with Babel, they developed 16 or 17 songs in various states of completeness, and much of the writing was finished while in the studio. (Twelve made it on to the album.)

“We kept writing better songs during the process, so new songs would leap over all the songs we were going to record for the record,” Mumford says. “Writing-wise, we were more collaborative on this record and I think that comes through in songs like “Hopeless Wanderer,” which took a bit longer to write but benefited from various people’s input.”

While it may seem obvious that there are two parts to any Mumford & Sons song—the lyrics and the music—it’s a popular misperception that Mumford writes all the lyrics. Marshall, for instance, was responsible for the early tune “Winter Winds.” While none of the members care to overly elucidate who’s contributed what songs to their catalog, what is clear is that lyrical process changed with Babel.