Marcus Mumford had a trauma specialist check his new album before making the songs public.
The 35-year-old singer - who has two children with wife Carey Mulligan - has opened up about being sexually abused as a child when he was just six years old in his debut solo LP 'Self-Titled' but admitted he was wary of "triggering" people who have shared similar experiences.
He said: "I didn’t just want to hang traumatic stuff out there and activate or trigger people."
The Mumford and Sons frontman has found it "helpful" to work through his own struggles and "shame" in his work, and didn't hesitate about releasing them.
He told The Guardian newspaper: “It felt like a natural and quite helpful part of my process, now I was less engulfed in shame.
"Because of what I do and who I am, the natural extension of this process of handling and coming to terms with this stuff was to write a song about it.
“Taking these intimate things, these really private moments and publicising them as widely as possible – it’s just a f*****-up thing to do. But there’s a magic in it, I think, because you offer the opportunity for people to connect through it.”
And Marcus isn't worried that touring the record will make him "relive" his experiences.
He said: "I think that’s part of the whole thing for me, part of the process. It doesn’t make me relive anything when I play Cannibal. In the way I felt I had to approach or felt compelled to approach talking about this record, it started with the heavy stuff, but the rest of the record … yeah, there’s some heavy stuff, but there’s an invitation there that makes it appropriate for a congregational space.
"It’s not just like: ‘Look at all my pain.' Really, it’s an album about freedom.”
The 'Little Lion Man' singer had turned to alcoholism and binge-eating towards the end of Mumford and Sons' last tour in 2019 so eventually went into trauma therapy to tackle his buried feelings.
He recalled: “When you’re travelling all the time, you’re able to convince yourself of anything, to make excuses not to take responsibility. 'Oh, I’m on my own, so I can have a few drinks in my room'. or 'I can have a few pints of ice-cream in my room because I’m medicating loneliness, or shame, or whatever it is.'
"People around me said: ‘You’ve got to figure this out, mate,’ but they didn’t know what the problem was, and neither did I."
