It was something he’d kept to himself, disclosing it for the first time during a therapy session the previous year, which Cannibal also describes: “When I began to tell, it became the hardest thing I ever thing said out loud,” he sings, “the words got locked in my throat – man, I choked.” Grace, the song that follows it on Self-Titled, describes the ensuing conversation: “I’m fine, it’s all right, do I sound like I’m lying?” Elton John gave me a talking to about being fearless and unafraid that I’ll never forget Cannibal starkly details the sexual abuse Mumford experienced as a six-year-old, in terms that are variously furious – “you fucking animal” – and self-lacerating and that, ultimately, edge towards forgiveness. He does remember recording the demo, and playing it to his mum and having to tell her about its subject matter. It was followed by a time when Mumford went into trauma therapy and a period when he didn’t want to write songs at all: he was “in denial about being an artist, when I’d only hang around with, like, farmers or estate agents”. Then there was a period where “people around me said: ‘You’ve got to figure this out, mate,’ but they didn’t know what the problem was, and neither did I”. “Oh, I’m on my own, so I can have a few drinks in my room,” or “I can have a few pints of ice-cream in my room because I’m medicating loneliness, or shame, or whatever it is.”
“When you’re travelling all the time, you’re able to convince yourself of anything, to make excuses not to take responsibility,” he says. They began with a collapse into alcohol addiction and binge-eating towards the end of the last Mumford & Sons tour in 2019.
But he’s very clear about the circumstances leading up to writing it. M arcus Mumford says he doesn’t actually remember writing Cannibal, the extraordinary song that opens his debut solo album, Self-Titled.
0 kommentar(er)
