Mumford and Sons, Edward Sharpe, and Old Crow Medicine Show: The forgotten concert film from once upon in a time in an awful folk era
Indie folk was going through a torrid time in the early 2010s, and as much as acts like Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear were trying their damned hardest to prop up its good name, plenty of others wanted to make a version so insipid that it dragged the rest of the genre down with it.
We already know who the suspects are; in the UK, we were plagued with the ‘stomp and clap’ dross that is Mumford and Sons, while the US, not wanting to be outdone, conjured up their pseudo-cult in Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros in order to really get the bile flowing from the guts of their detractors. Granted, we’d decided to forget about the latter act until recently, when their 2010 hit ‘Home’ sparked a viral discussion about it potentially being the worst song of all time, but at the time of their rise in popularity, they were practically unavoidable.
It was a truly strange time in the musical landscape where tweeness and tweed suddenly became fashionable, and people were going loopy for songs that were so overly saccharine and sentimental that their supposed messages of hope and love felt hollow, which, given how Mumford and Sons’ banjo player Winston Marshall turned out to be an alt-right sympathising well of bigotry, only exacerbated the feelings of mistrust.
The music was insufferable, and the people even more so, so imagine being stuck on a train with these individuals, all competing to see who could out-prat one another in a contest of musical vapidity. The 2012 documentary film, Big Easy Express, means you don’t have to imagine such a horrific scenario – you can experience it as if you were truly there.
Sure, it’s bad enough for anyone being stuck next to someone who has obnoxiously loud phone conversations on the Megabus, and I have the utmost sympathy for anyone stuck in that treacherous scenario, but if you’re voluntarily embarking on a cross-country trip with this particular cabal, that’s a trench you’ve dug for yourself.
The film itself follows the Mumfords, Magnetic Zeros and American bluegrass outfit Old Crow Medicine Show on their 2011 Railroad Revival Tour, which took a 17-carriage train from Oakland, California to New Orleans, Louisiana, with four stops along the way for additional performances, and was done as a way of honouring both the US railroad’s history and the roots and folk music traditions of the country. This in itself isn’t such a bad idea, but it’s the smugness and pretence with which it’s all done that makes the entire thing seem farcical.
Despite this, the tour and subsequent documentary film were well received, with it winning awards at the 2012 edition of SXSW, and with director Emmett Malloy receiving a Grammy Award nomination for ‘Best Music Film’ at the 2013 ceremony. However, the trio of groups tried to replicate its success the following year, aiming to bring a host of additional acts across the country with them, including Willie Nelson, Band of Horses and comedian John C Reilly, although plans never materialised, with the entire project being canned.
It’s the sort of documentary film that feels like a time capsule when you look back on it now, and while its tone is meant to be celebratory, it’s the sort of thing that only serves to emphasise the idea that extreme hipsterism was the dagger in the back of the music industry at the time. While there are still audiences who flock to see Mumford and Sons in concert, the popularity of the other two groups has waned significantly, and that only goes to show how these acts and this film about them could only have existed during this particular era where culture was in a confused transitional period, and mainstream art seemed bereft of all sincerity.
