Songfacts®:

• This song finds Marcus Mumford longing for loved ones left behind whilst on the road. The track originated with a piano part created by the band's Ben Lovett when the group was staying in a small house in Nashville, Tennessee in early 2011. "My bedroom was right next to the living room, where we had a little setup," recalled Mumford to American Songwriter of overhearing Lovett tinkering the ivories. "I was in bed, hungover, and I thought, 'F--k, I need to get in that room, because that sounds amazing.' We wrote the song that day."
• Bassist Ted Dwane told Rolling Stone how the song was conceived: "We took a break last Christmas and that's, in my mind, where the conception of the [recording] session began." he explained. "We had two months off. It's the only real break we've had since 2007 as a band. And it was a very intentional time apart just to write. We came back together in Nashville and had a week of writing there in a little farmhouse someone lent us. We basically had a Mumford & Sons sort of workshop where all the ideas would come up and soundcheck or whatever. It was really messy, full of weird bits of half-developed stuff, and we were basically just sort of trolling through all of that stuff in Nashville and working out which ideas needed to be developed and which were good songs. We wrote 'Hopeless Wanderer' there and that we haven't played live yet. It's one of my favorites, too. I think it sonically, it really defines the album, in a way: the excitement and drive."
• The Mumford outfit step aside and allow four stand-ins to offer their take on the song's music video, which incorporates just about every folksy cliché out there. The quartet of all stars are Arrested Development actor Jason Bateman as Winston Marshall, The Hangover star Ed Helms plays Ben Lovett, and former Saturday Night Live comedians Jason Sudeikis and Will Forte portray Marcus Mumford and Ted Dwane respectively. Said Helms: "We had an absolute blast shooting this video and the final product only confirms what I felt going in - thank god we're a fake band."
  
  "We're so grateful to be a successful fake band," he continued. "It's been years of fake dedication and fake hard work to get here, and I really believe we are at the forefront of abject fraudulence."
  
  The video was directed by Sam Jones, who was also responsible for the clip For The Foo Fighters' "Walk," which won Best Rock Video at the 2011 MTV VMAs.
• The video was filmed in April 2013. Banjo player Winston Marshall just so happened to be vacationing in the States at the time and stopped by. That's actually his hands playing the banjo in the close-up shots.