A young boy watches over his dying mother and fantasizes about better times with her in the video for Mumford and Sons’ new Delta single “Beloved.” The son and mother, who’s still wearing a hospital gown, run around, go shoplifting and ride horses on a beach. “Before you leave, you must know you are beloved,” Marcus Mumford sings against a serene backdrop of synths and guitars, “and before you leave, remember I was with you.” It all builds to an emotional finale.
“Everyone knows loss in one way or another,” Marcus Mumford said in a statement. “This song is about that. I’d never sat with anyone as they died before, and it had an effect on me. As it does everyone I know who has experienced it. But there’s wildness and beauty in it as well, and a deep honoring, that became the beginnings of this song that we worked up called ‘Beloved.’ I feel determined for people to take whatever they want from it, and not to be emotionally prescriptive.”
Charlotte Regan, whose 2017 short film Standby was nominated for a BAFTA, directed the clip, and shot it in and around Port Talbot, Wales. “Port Talbot was an amazing place,” she said. “To be honest it was somewhere I hadn’t thought about until the band mentioned it. I used to visit my nan up north in Redcar where she lived for a little while and remembered looking down long streets and seeing kids playing football or curby with these big industrial buildings in the background, and initially, that was where I had in mind. But as soon as we started looking at pictures of Port Talbot, we knew it was perfect. It was a proper beautiful place with an amazing sense of community but still maintained that kind of grit we were looking for.”
The group is currently touring the United States through March 31st. At a recent gig in Cleveland, the band covered Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” They’ll return to North America in August for shows along the West Coast and in the Rockies.