Review

Culture

Music

Redemption

2 February 2024

6 min read

Welcome to the revelation, good people

Mumford and Sons team up with Pharrell Williams. Belle Tindall unpacks their new track – Good People.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Two singers peform together. One in a white suit and stetson claps their hands. The other tilts the mic stand.

Pharrell Williams and Marcus Mumford perform Good People.

Listen to Good People

Whenever I bump into the familiar sounds of a Mumford & Sons song, it’s 2013 and they’re headlining the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. I can close my eyes and see the whole scene before me; it’s all trumpets and tweed. But when I take a moment, and home in on the lyrics, it’s a different scene that I see. There’s a story in the Bible where a man, Jacob, spends a night physically wrestling with God, it’s all dirt and elbows, the created grappling with the creator. And, occasionally, when listening to Mumford & Sons’ catalogue, I feel as though I’m watching that scene play out. I’m listening to souls laid bare, I’m witnessing people gripping the divine in the dirt. I get the sense that their lyrics have been born of a wrestling match, not a writing session; they’re crafted by people who are limping out of a tussle with truth.

Mumford & Sons – Marcus Mumford, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane - seem to have largely grown out of their 2013 selves. But, if their new single is anything to go by, they haven’t grown out of wrestling their lyrics into existence.

From the first line until its last, this song has but one message to proclaim: change, the redemptive kind, is at hand.

Good People is the first track that they’ve released in five long years, and offered up in partnership with the mighty Pharrell Williams, it has been lorded as the collaboration that nobody saw coming. Speaking of the collaborative process, the band wrote that,

‘...this song came together fast. Like, in a day. We haven’t relied on immediate instincts like that, really, since the very early days of our band. It has felt fast and loose and really, really fun.’

The additional presence of Native Vocalists, a six-piece choir hailing from Native American Tribes within the northern Great Plains, makes this track a mosaic of musical influences. But we should have expected this, Pharrell’s insatiable creative curiosity has taken him to some unexpected places, an alternative-folk song is merely his latest destination. What’s more, it is a destination that he has come to by way of gospel music, and it shows, both in style and lyrical substance.

Of course, the song is peppered with the band’s signature religious language – there’s plenty of references to night and day, light and dark – all of which could have slid off a page of the Bible. Plus, Jesus is outright quoted in the second verse. It’s pretty obvious that the Biblical authors have their fingerprints all over this intriguing song.

But that’s still not what has caught my eye. Not quite.

Rather, it’s the message that this song is announcing, and where such a message might just derive from. Because, from the first line until its last, this song has but one message to proclaim: change, the redemptive kind, is at hand. Things are about to get better.

The chorus goes like this:

good people been down for so long
(Welcome to the revelation)

and now it's like the sun is rising
(Welcome to the revelation)

good people been down for so long
(Welcome to the revelation)

and now I see the sun is rising

It is the inevitability of this change, which is emphasised over and over again, that has me so intrigued. This change, the details of which are masterfully omitted (meaning this song can exist as a hopeful meta-anthem, free from the confines of prescriptive context), is as unavoidable as the sunrise. This change cannot be hindered, just as the breaking of the dawn cannot be hindered. One can stare at the midnight sky, enveloped by darkness, and still know with complete assurance that the sun will return. Morning will come; it is a certainty, which is an incredibly rare thing.

Subsequently, this song isn’t a call to arms, Pharrell’s backing-vocal response to Marcus Mumford’s words is not ‘welcome to the revolution’, but ‘welcome to the revelation’. It is a call, not to make the change happen, but to witness it happen – pointing its audience not toward action, but toward hope. Hope in a redemption that is inevitable and a prevailing goodness that is written into the fabric of reality. It will come, it will be. And this subtle, yet salient, detail places this song in a very specific category of hopeful anthems. It sits with the likes of:

Sam Cooke, who in 1964, declared that:

‘it’s been a long time coming, but I know that a change is gonna’ come. Oh, yes it will.’

Or Lauryn Hill, who wrote in 1998 that,

‘everything is everything. What is meant to be, will be. After winter, must come spring. Change, it comes eventually’.

These songs, written in the middle of the night, speak of the coming dawn.

Which got me thinking, what taught us to do that? What taught us to believe that if it’s not good, it’s not the end? That if it’s not redeemed, it’s not over? What taught Sam Cooke, amid such injustice and violence, to have such a defiantly hope-filled message to declare? What taught Lauryn Hill to simultaneously lament over the struggles faced by black, inner-city, communities in America, and yet affirm that ‘after winter, must come spring’? And what has taught Mumford & Sons, and Pharrell Williams for that matter, to announce that after such a ‘long night’, they can see that 'the sun is rising’?

On what grounds can we possibly believe such a thing to be true?

It's a big question. Perhaps one of the biggest. And while I’m weary of declaring that I have the answer (at least, on anyone’s behalf but my own), I certainly have a theory. And I feel relatively confident putting it forward, considering his words pop up in the second verse of Good People.

My theory, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Jesus; the ‘light that shines in the darkness’, the one that we’re told darkness has not, and cannot, ‘overcome’. The one whose entrance into the world was, as the Biblical story goes, as preventable as the dawn (these themes sound familiar to you?). The one who, for thousands of years, has had communities of people looking into the darkness and declaring ‘I beg to differ’.

My theory is that Jesus taught us to believe redemption to be true. The things he did, the things he said, the things he fulfilled, but more than that – I think it is his death, and ultimately, his re-established life. I sense, in these songs, a hint toward the great story which underpins every other story. I hear the reverberations of Jesus’ resurrection in these lyrics.

I’m just not convinced that we’d be so sure that redemption will get the final say if something, or rather someone, hadn’t shown such to be the case. And so, I suppose what I'm ultimately suggesting is that any 'revelation' that this song intends to welcome us into has a distinctive flavour of Jesus about it.

I wonder whether Marcus, Ben, Ted and Pharrell would really believe that if something isn’t good, it isn’t over, had Jesus not taught them to.

Watch Good People Live

Good People was first performed live at Pharrell Williams' Men’s Fall-Winter 2024 fashion show for Louis Vuitton. Williams is the creative director at the fashion house. Nativist Vocals perform first, followed by Williams and Mumford & Sons.

Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”