Chosen song and Band

My chosen song is Roll Away Your Stone by the band Mumford & Sons.

Mumford & Sons are an English folk rock band with 4 band members who formed in December 2007. Marcus Mumford (vocals, guitar, drums, mandolin), Ben Lovett (vocals, keyboards, accordion, drums), Country Winston Marshall (vocals, banjo, dobro, guitar), and Ted Dwane (vocals, string bass, drums, guitar).

Mumford & Sons recorded an EP, 'Love Your Ground', and performed in small to moderate venues in the UK and US to expose audiences to their music and build support for an eventual album. Their debut album, 'Sigh No More', was released in the UK and Ireland in October 2009, and February 2010 in the United States. The album reached number one in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and eventually peaked at number two on the UK Album Chart and the Billboard 200 in the US. The band's second studio album 'Babel' is set to be released on September 24, 2012.

The band gained popularity throughout 2010, performing for larger audiences and making their first network television appearances in the US. On 1 December 2010, the band received two Grammy Award nominations, one for Best New Artist and the other for Best Rock Song ("Little Lion Man"). The ensuing live performance at the Grammy ceremony in February led to increased airplay and popularity for singles from 'Sigh No More'. The band won the ARIA Music Award for Most Popular International Artist in 2010, and the Brit Award in 2011 for Best British Album. Furthermore, in 2011 they received a European Border Breakers Award for their international success.

Mumford & Sons uses bluegrass and folk instrumentation, such as a banjo, upright bass, mandolin and piano, played with a rhythmic style based in alternative rock and folk. The foursome bonded over their shared love of "rootsy" music.

Much of Mumford & Sons' lyrical content has a strong literary influence, its debut album name deriving from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. The track "Sigh No More" includes lines from the play such as Serve God love me and mend and One foot in sea and one on shore. The song "Roll Away Your Stone" is influenced by Macbeth; the song includes the line Stars hide your fires / And these here are my desires which echoes Macbeth's line in Act 1 Scene 4: Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires. In an interview, Mumford was quoted as saying, "You can rip off Shakespeare all you like; no lawyer's going to call you up on that one." Additionally, "The Cave" includes several references to The Odyssey, also referencing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", from The Republic. More specifically, the song references G.K. Chesterton's book St. Francis of Assisi, in which Chesterton uses Plato's Cave as a way of explaining how St. Francis views the world from God's perspective.

Both "Timshel" and "Dust Bowl Dance" draw heavily from the John Steinbeck novels Of Mice and Men, East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath. Mumford, in an interview, even compared touring to a Steinbeck adventure: "[Steinbeck] talked about how a journey is a thing of its own, and you can't plan it or predict it too much because that suffocates the life out it. That's kind of what touring is like. Even though there's a structure—you know what towns you're going to, and that you'll be playing a gig—pretty much anything can happen." Mumford also in his spare time runs an online book club on the band's official web site.