I’ve been waiting for a new Mumford & Sons album for at least two years, and it finally came out this week. So far, I think this is my favorite song. Something about the “let me die where I lie” line reminds me of that age-old protestant prayer that I had to say as child bed.
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” It’s sort of fitting, as Marcus Mumford is apparently a preacher’s kid.
My best-friend moved to Maine at the beginning of the summer. She lives, with her husband and son, just outside of Portland. Her best description of it sounded something like this: “I don’t know why you don’t live here… Everyone has a dog and is outside all the time.” So when I got an email from the Mumford & Sons website a few months back announcing the Gentlemen of the Road Tour — and I saw that one of the stopovers was in Portland — I immediately emailed Allison and told her I would be buying tickets and that I hoped she could go with me.
Jump to this weekend, I headed up to Maine to visit with my friend — who I hadn’t seen since May — check out a city I’d never been to, and see one of my favorite bands (which I’ve been trying to see for years). As it turned out, the venue for the Portland Stopover turned out to be unbelievably awesome. The concert was on Portland’s Eastern Promenade, which rolls gently down to the water. So the backdrop behind the stage was of beautiful water, boats, and islands.
Not too shabby! Continue reading
By the time you see this, I’ll already have enjoyed these fellas at the Gentlemen of the Road Stopover in Portland, ME…along with my best friend who I haven’t seen in way too long. And it’s entirely possible that I have either succeeded in convincing them all to sing me to sleep every night…or that I’ve been arrested.
I never tire of Mumford & Sons. They’re working on a new album and I can hardly wait. And “Timshel” is one of those songs that I forget about until I hear it and I love it all over again. But it’s funny, when I read East of Eden as a kid in school, we only read parts of the rather enormous book, but I really liked it. And whenever I Google the word “timshel” that old Steinbeck classic appears. In fact, Timshel.org is nothing but a passage from the book. The word has come to mean, in part because of Steinbeck, “thou mayest” and represent the idea of man’s struggle between good and evil.
Seems to me like it’s a good name for a cat…but all my pets have names.
This video made me happy on my day off. Now, off to another episode of Downton Abbey and then for a jaunt with the dog!
I am not-so-patiently awaiting a new Mumford & Sons album. A couple weeks ago I event sent my cousin in England an email asking if she could smuggle me any Mumford stuff that hadn’t been released in America, but as it turns out there isn’t anything like that. So, my best b et has been to revisit the songs that didn’t necessarily stand out to me as favorites over the past Mumford-obsessed-year. This is one of them:
Writer. Editor. Storyteller. 