Mumford & Sons Baptizes a Rainy Fenway Park [Photos]

Mumford & Sons brought their Prizefighter Tour to the Fenway Concert Series in Boston on Monday, June 22nd, and if you’d told the 35,000-odd fans filing through the Lansdowne gates that they’d spend two hours getting drenched and not care in the slightest, most of them would have believed you. This is, after all, what Mumford & Sons do — they make you forget yourself. They just happened to do it in a downpour this time.

Dylan Gossett opened the evening around 6:30 with a lean, unhurried set that played surprisingly well against the scale of the park. The Austin singer-songwriter’s brand of western heartbreak doesn’t scream “stadium,” but “Coal” landed with genuine weight, his voice carrying over a crowd still shuffling to their seats with a warmth that quieted the chatter in the grandstands. He earned his spot.

Lord Huron followed and proved a savvy middle-card pick, their cinematic indie-folk threading the needle between Gossett’s intimacy and the headliner’s bombast. By the time they wrapped, the drizzle had committed to a proper rain, and nobody was leaving.

Marcus Mumford and company hit the stage around 8:30 and opened with “Begin Again,” a statement of intent from Rushmere that doubled as a wink to the faithful. From there, the setlist was generous and unapologetic about its own back catalogue: “Babel,” “Little Lion Man,” “White Blank Page,” all delivered with the throttle wide open. The new material held its own. “Prizefighter” and “Badlands” have a muscularity that the early records only hinted at, and hearing them ricochet off Fenway’s brick and steel made a strong case that the band’s louder, post-Delta direction was always heading here.

But the night’s best moments were the quiet ones — or at least, the ones that started quiet. During “The Cave,” the band pulled back and let the crowd take the wheel. What followed was one of those goosebump Fenway moments: tens of thousands of voices filling the silence, the song bouncing off the Green Monster and rolling back across the diamond. Mumford stood at the mic with his arms wide, grinning like a kid, and just let it happen. It lasted maybe thirty seconds, but it felt much longer.

“I am so sorry the Scottish brought the rain with them,” Mumford told the crowd midway through, to predictable roaring. He didn’t seem sorry. Neither did anyone else.

The deep cut of the night was “Ditmas,” during which Mumford abandoned the stage entirely, hopping down and weaving through the field-level crowd, slapping hands and shouting hellos as his bandmates vamped behind him. By the time he made it back to the mic, it felt like he’d rounded the bases after a walkoff homer.

He introduced “Here” — the Chris Stapleton collaboration from Rushmere — as “my favorite song we’ve ever written,” and you could hear it in the delivery. It’s a slow burner, nakedly emotional in a way that could tip into maudlin in lesser hands, but Mumford sang it like he was talking to one person, not a stadium. The rain helped. Everything felt closer.

They closed the main set with “I Will Wait,” the banjo riff detonating the place one more time. The encore wound down with the tender “Conversation With My Son” before fireworks erupted over the light towers, albeit a little on the nose, but try not to feel something when the sky above Fenway lights up while 35,000 soaking wet people are still singing.

Mumford & Sons are fifteen years and five albums into this thing now, and Monday’s show was a reminder that they’ve outlasted most of the arguments against them. The “are they authentic enough” discourse has mercifully aged out, and what’s left is a band that plays like they mean it to crowds who feel the same way. On a rain-soaked Monday night in the Fens, that was more than enough.