What I’m Listening To: Mumford & Sons
Every once in a while I become obsessed, infected with a CD. The most recent is one that my son, Coleson, put me onto: “Sigh No More” from Mumford & Sons, a West London band whose melancholic melodies just bore down into my soul (and my own melancholy). You can listen to a healthy dose of samples on their MySpace page.
It is now the official soundtrack of the “Cultural Liturgies” project! Maybe it’s the mandolin, or the haunting sigh in the lead voice, or the hint of banjo every once in a while, but I have not been able to turn it off.
And on top of all its affective power are poetic lyrics that convey a certain earthly mysticism. Consider, for instance, the opening track, “Sigh No More”:
Love that will not betray you,
dismay or enslave you,
It will set you free
To be more like the man
you were made to be.
There is a design,
An alignment to cry,
At my heart you see,
The beauty of love
as it was made to be.
It doesn’t get any more Augustinian than that! Or consider this snippet on love and embodiment from “Awake My Soul”:
In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die;
Where you invest your love, you invest your life.
That could pretty much read as an epigraph of Desiring the Kingdom. These selections don’t do justice to the interplay between music and lyrics. Give them a listen.
