Mumford & Sons followed up their 2025 album Rushmere immediately with Prizefighter. Produced alongside Aaron Dessner at his Long Pond studios around the same era as he produced Brandi Carlile’s 2025 album. There is a kind of collective with this group of people who have all known each other for many years.
Marcus Mumford has been a part of the “Joni Jams” both privately and on stage for years. During a promotional interview he told how the song Rubber Band Man was formed from lyrics that Brandi Carlile had texted him, and she has a writing credit on the album.
“What is a rubber band man? Uh it’s a song about change I think. And weirdly, I was um I was in Paris with Aaron and Brandi Carile texted me. She’d had a dream about me and um had these lyrics. She’d like written a poem I think kind of in her sleep and it included the some of the verse lyrics for Rubber Band Man. And I was like, “Can I make these into a song?” She was like, “Yeah, that’s what they’re for.” You know, I know Brandi very well. She knows me very well at this point and um I think she just knew the kind of story I would like to tell at this point and it was yeah it was it was rubber band man. So that was like the second song really that we written fresh for this for this record and um it just felt like it worked really well.
So Brandi Carlile was dreaming and wrote the lyrics and texted you and that’s where the song came?Yeah On the record, there’s a feature. Yes. So then we called up Andrew Hozier who is an old friend. We just love him to bits. He feels like Kindred to us as does Brandi. So with Aaron as well who helped us with the demos for our third record in 2013 or something. So between, you know, Hosia, Brandi, Aaron,
it’s all and I Justin Vernon who helped us with a couple of songs on the record. You know, it’s this like little I think we’ve never really represented on record how collaborative we are as a band and always have been.
