British roots-rock brethren, Mumford & Sons, are hosting four summer music events across the U.S. to help promote their exceedingly anticipated new album.
Dubbing their August tour Gentlemen of the Road, Mumford & Sons’ vision includes each “stopover” as an attraction which piques all senses. The quartet’s official tour website, GentlemenoftheRoad.com, describes every stop as “a day-long event, celebrating the music, food and people of the places we’re visiting. We’ll be bringing a full lineup of some of our favorite bands from around the world, and curating events that combine a music festival and local gathering into one epic party. We plan to start early, and go late, taking the party from the stage to the town.”
The quartet explained their ambition in a press release, according to soundspike.com. Keen on engaging local communities, they plan on utilizing neighborhood businesses, bars and venues “for after-show parties, whilst working closely with the local people to get everyone involved in making these shows spectacular.” The idea is to celebrate and “showcase the venues, food, people and attractions of small-town life,” wrote a reporter from the Journal Star, a newspaper from Peoria, Illinois. The band chose a spread of locations that both spanned the nation and hit locations where groups don’t often tour.
The stopovers include: The Eastern Promenade in Portland, Maine on August 4, 2012, four blocks along State Street in downtown Bristol, Virginia — which abuts the Tennessee/Virginia border — on August 11, Page Park in Dixon, Illinois on August 18 — “a camping stopover,” according the Gentlemen’s website — and the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California on August 25. Mumford & Sons concluded the Gentlemen’s tour note by adding, “Please come join us if you can. It’ll be a whole lot of fun.”
Tickets went on sale at 10am local time on Friday, June 1, excluding the Illinois celebration, which will be made available on Saturday, June 9 at 10 a.m. Central Time.
Other acts slated to join them include Gogol Bordello, St. Vincent, Dawes, The Very Best, Apache Relay, and The Maccabees. “There will be a host of our friends playing too,” Mumford & Sons asserted in the press release. “The vibe falls somewhere between ‘travelling Victorian circus’ and ‘Victorian travelling circus.'” For a complete line-up for each performance, visit Mumford & Sons’ official website.
“Sigh No More,” their debut studio album from 2009, was an international success. Debuting high on music charts from the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, it gained even more exposure with two Grammy Nominations and upon winning the 2011 BRIT Awards’ Album of the Year.
Ben Lovett, multi-instrumentalist — a trademark characteristic of all four of the band members who dynamically transition among instruments and stage locations during their performances — confirmed to 3FM, a radio station out of Belgium, that the new record is due out September 24 of this year, and won’t be too different from their first. “Nothing’s really changed in our dynamic as a band. We write songs together and they’re very much based in our experiences. The instruments are pretty much the same, except for a few we’ve picked up along the way. For the most part, it’s a progression. We don’t want to reinvent ourselves.”