For any non-Mumford & Sons fans, it’s not all that rare to dismiss the group as having music that “all sounds the same” – the reputation they unfortunately developed around the time that I Will Wait went radio viral. But for any ongoing doubters of the band’s musical versality, I’d only turn them to a good listen of There Will Be Time.
Mumford paired up with Senegalese singer Baaba Maal to write the track – which, along with four others, came to collectively make up their 2016 Johannesburg EP. The songs were all produced by Johan Hugo of the Afro-Western music group The Very Best.
This sort of cross-border, -language, and -cultural exchange is a rare thing of beauty in any kind of music. There Will Be Time is sung in both English and Pulaar, with the two languages winding throughout. I’ve always appreciated Marcus Mumford’s intensity but Baaba Maal brings such a strong, guttural depth to the vocal mix --- even at the rowdiest points of the song, his voice soars above everything else.
There Will Be Time offers one of the best suspense build-ups I’ve ever heard --- truly, ever.
We start off unassumingly for the first few verses. Translated from Pulaar, Baaba Maal sings in the first --- “Listen to me, I want to tell you something: the reason I love you is because you are the only one who has taught me how to love and appreciate life.” But even without understanding the words as you hear them, Mumford joins in just after to make it known that we’re hearing a profound expression of gratitude: “In the cold light, I live to love and adore you / It’s all that I am, it’s all that I have.” From the tone that they sing with, it’s also clear that this isn’t just any declaration of love. It has the spiritual depth of a prayer of sorts: “Open up my eyes to a new light / I wandered ‘round your darkened land all night.”
For those first verses, the instrumentation remains restrained – the crescendo starting only subtly. But slowly, more and more instruments come on stage, as Mumford and Maal start to sing with escalating emotion, eventually completely shedding the composure they opened with.
The pivotal moment of the song comes at 2:23: all of a sudden it feels as if the music starts to bubble until it can’t help but completely boil over. The voices all come in together in a powerful harmony, everyone now singing at the very top of their lungs while all the instruments go crazy in a beautiful cacophony. And with the mass of instruments being used, there are so many to listen for, so much to focus on.
The energy is unbelievable – heart-pounding, pulse racing, blood boiling sort of stuff. It’s impossible to listen through this song without inevitably being carried away by it – when the music picks up, you take off with it. The force of the build-up sounds larger-than-life – as if it’s gratefully brimming over and also falling to its knees. You really get the feeling that the narrator is looking up to the skies, singing some profound praise.
The song can be interpreted in so many ways. It can be about religious faith – maybe the most common interpretation since Baaba Maal references an Ecclesiastes verse in the bridge. Or it can be about love, or meaning, or all of the beauty of life in general and our existential struggle to stay in touch with it.
My interpretation is a combination of these, but what I'm sure of is that it's most fundamentally a song about the human condition; about our constant longing for goodness and purpose and yet our perpetual falling short. As Mumford powerfully belts “Why do I keep falling?”, I always think of Albert Camus’ Sisyphus finding himself again at the bottom of the hill. The artists so powerfully manage to capture the fundamental experience of being.
I was, of course, instantly hooked by There Will Be Time the first time I heard it, but it’s the live version (below) that completely won me over. The video of the performance comes from the group’s South African tour, and it’s impossible to watch it without a spur of awe. I’ve never seen so much pure joy on stage – as if the artists have tapped into some transcendent level of the music and are completely overtaken by it. It’s such a beautiful thing to observe all of this creative energy coming together in a mutual appreciation for the art.
Happy listening!
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