Videos: Mumford & Sons, “Hopeless Wanderer”
Music videos can be works of art in their own right. Here we take a look at those which have used the medium best.
At first glance, Mumford & Sons’ video for “Hopeless Wanderer” is pretty typical. We see bright, sunny shots of the outdoors as the song’s opening chords play, shots of the band’s instruments, and then finally, the band members themselves. Except…that’s not Mumford & Sons at all.
Rather, it’s comedic actors Ed Helms, Jason Sudeikis, Will Forte, and Jason Bateman, and over the course of the clip, they do their finest impressions of Mumford & Sons — or maybe it’s more like their finest impressions of what they think it must be like to be in a folk band. They sing and play their instruments with gusto, with an empty barn and a boat on a lake as their stage. And then things take a turn for the absurd, becoming more of what we’d expect from these four. After a delightfully bearded Forte does a wonderfully melodramatic, tearful lip sync, he and Sudeikis begin an aggressive make-out session, signaling a mood shift from simply a playful homage which ends in a full rock-star instrument-smashing session, with just a little bit of humping thrown in by Forte.
“The idea of goofing around for the day was exciting,” Bateman told USA Today when the video was first released.
And fortunately, that day of goofing off had a great end result that the band was happy with.
“The band loved it — they didn’t want to change a thing,” director Sam Jones told Rolling Stone. “I’m obviously so excited that everybody is watching it. It was one of those rare experiences where the record company and the band really let me do what I wanted to do.” He also later told MTV, “I just can’t imagine a lot of bands that would be that cool.”
Similarly, Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett told the publication that the video “was just a lot funnier than I think any of us had expected, ’cause the guys were totally just riffing.”
Jones also revealed that Sudeikis wasn’t actually lip-syncing but rather “sang at the top of his lungs — all day.”
One can only imagine the atmosphere of the one-day shoot. Its end product is a delight, and one that is bound to get some laughs.
