The release of the new Mumford & Sons album this week has attracted attention because the band has dispensed with its trademark banjo and accordion sound, and also of course because it is a fine album by a great band. But I find myself rather more interested in another aspect, and almost feeling guilty and voyeuristic to be interested.

As reviewers of the album have pointed out, the lyrics refer to relationship difficulties. Our critic wrote: “Mumford is forever seeking to mend fissures in relationships, wracked by guilt, doubt or recrimination, and hesitant about the future course of love.”

Nothing out of the ordinary there, except that chief songwriter and band leader Marcus Mumford is married to famous film star Carey Mulligan. The couple met at a Christian youth camp. So is Mumford writing about Mulligan here? Is the star of Far from the Madding Crowd the woman of whom one song declares: “I’m not strong enough to bear the weight of your love.”?

As I ask myself that question, I know that I can be accused of diminishing the process of making art. Marcus Mumford has a fertile imagination and could well be inventing situations and indeed characters in his songs. In addition, he is not the sole songwriter. The band collaborates on many songs, though we know that on previous albums Mumford was chief songwriter.

So, it’s a little risky to draw too many conclusions. I’m just interested, from a listener’s perspective, in how one reacts to a song (or a poem, a play, a novel) when one has too much information about the writer's personal life. Is it possible to put that information out of mind, and judge what one is hearing, reading or seeing purely on its merits as a piece of fiction?

Sorry, it isn’t. I have been in a room where Arthur Miller denied that his play After the Fall, about a marriage between an intellectual and a singer on the edge, who commits suicide, was actually about his own marriage to Marilyn Monroe. He denied it, yet I defy anyone to watch the play and not think of Marilyn Monroe. And, of course, he must have known that. The play’s similarities to real-life gave it an added dimension (and Miller was sometimes castigated for them).

Next time I see Carey Mulligan on screen or stage, I might just wonder about her husband’s obsession with those “fissures in relationships” identified by our reviewer. And I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. Marcus Mumford is savvy enough to know that the band’s songs are given an extra edge by the possible real-life associations, just as Fleetwood Mac’s famous break-up album Rumours is enhanced for the listener working out the various permutations of pain, just as Ted Hughes’s searing poetry can become even more disturbingly memorable, when one identifies certain poems as being about Sylvia Plath.

Too much information isn’t necessarily limiting. It can be an aid to literary and musical criticism.

Groundhog Day for Matthew Warchus

The appointment of Matthew Warchus to succeed Kevin Spacey as artistic director of London’s Old Vic theatre was an inspired one. Warchus is a brilliant director and the first season that he has now announced, with a musical of Groundhog Day among the treats, is mouth-watering. Actually, Mr Warchus must know himself what Groundhog Day feels like, for he has been artistic director of the Old Vic before, even though that fact seems to be news to many of his associates and spokespeople, and is simply not mentioned in any of his press material. It was more than a decade ago, and only for a very brief time, before he pursued other avenues in America for a while. It’s good to have him back in the hot seat. As for the Groundhog Day show, it might be a fittingly mischievous idea to stage the same scene and song over and over again. Audiences booking for a musical of Groundhog Day couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned.

BritArt lives on, and on, and on…

Whatever one thought of Sarah Lucas’s show at the Venice Biennale this week, I do wonder why the artists featured at the British Pavilion are so often the former stars of BritArt. The British Council and its committee of contemporary art worthies who choose the artists have had the British Pavilion in recent years host BritArt luminaries Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili, Gary Hume and Rachel Whiteread. There are other sides of British art which we could show to the world. David Hockney, for example, is surely worthy of representing his country at the Biennale.

d.lister@independent.co.uk

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