As I occasionally do I’m playing you some recent additions to YouTube, albeit that some have been around for a couple of months. Three have been published in the past week, though, so I think I can just about justify my title! I like to give you these selections of what I’ve been listening to on my late evening YouTube sessions, and these are a good mix of what I’ve found.

I’m starting off with one that might surprise you, if you know my musical tastes, but I’ll explain why after you’ve seen it. This is an instrumental, but it gets us off to a joyous start:

When I was a kid, my parents were friends with a farmer who lived down the road from us, and we used to sometimes go down there to ‘help out’ with the animals and play with his daughter. She was really my sister’s friend rather than mine, which was a shame as she grew up to be gorgeous! His hobby was music and he played in a trad jazz band in some of the local pubs. I was too young to be there officially, but he used to tell publicans that I was the band’s roadie and I carried his clarinet for him as proof of my role (🤣). I loved the music and still do, hence my delight at finding Tuba Skinny some years ago on YouTube. They are a street trad jazz band based in New Orleans – where else? – and have been together since 2009, led by Shay Cohn, their trumpeter, second from left in this video but mostly hidden behind the clarinet player, Craig Flory. They have released thirteen albums and feature in more than 500 videos: they don’t have their own YouTube page and rely on fan videos – like this one – for their music to be shared. Many of them have upwards of 100k views, and this one already has 38k in the three weeks since it was posted. They make such a happy sound, and often feature Erika Lewis (sitting on the bass drum) as vocalist – she has a great voice. if you enjoyed this, there are plenty more to be found!

This next one is in rather different vein. It is from a singer-songwriter I have played before, and is a track from her new album. I think it’s beautiful:

Nina Nesbitt is Scottish, with a Swedish mother. An early claim to fame, if such it be, is that she used to be in a relationship with Ed Sheeran, who wrote a couple of songs about her during that time. Her new album – her third – is Älskar, which is Swedish for ‘to love,’ and it was released last month. To date it has reached #34 on the UK albums chart and #3 in Scotland. Many of the tracks, including this one, were written in collaboration with local musicians during a stay in Sweden. I follow her Facebook page and she is utterly delightful, and is one of those who takes a personal interest in interaction with fans of her music. She starts a UK tour next month and I hope that boosts the album: I think it deserves to go much higher.

There is going to be a female singer-songwriter vibe for the next two tracks as well. To my surprise, I haven’t played First Aid Kit before, though I am a big fan. Coincidentally they are from Sweden, but you’d be hard pressed to tell that from this:

First Aid Kit are sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg, and they have been making records since 2010. Klara is the younger one of the two and more often than not takes the lead vocal, as she does on this one. It is the opening track on what will be their sixth album, Palomino, which is due for release on 4 November. Several of the album’s songs have been pre-released and I’ve enjoyed them all, so I’m looking forward to it.

I have played Caroline Jones’ music several times before, including a whole post last year for her latest album. She is another of those who is very good at interacting with her fans, and gave us many delightful ‘from home’ sessions during lockdown. This has just been posted on her YouTube page though, as she explains in the introduction, she is just a sidekick in this:

Isn’t that beautiful? Such wonderful harmonies. As Caroline explains, the song was written by Makena Hartlin, who takes the lead vocal. I can find very little about Makena, who doesn’t yet have a Wikipedia page, and only has two songs on Apple Music – this one and Jealous Girls, which is equally good. Both were released this year so I’m hopeful that this is the start of something more from her. I did find reference to an eponymous three-track EP that was released in 2014, and found it on Reverbnation. It is lovely, but for some reason I don’t understand she has somehow forgotten about it, as The Apple is described on her Facebook page as being her debut. Still, if there is more to come from her maybe it will be allowed to see the light of day again, perhaps in re-recorded versions. She is too good not to be heard.

I don’t know if you saw the Fisherman’s Friends movie, which came out in 2019, but if not you’ve missed a really fun, feelgood film. It was loosely based on the story of the band by that name, who are a group of folk singers from Port Isaac in Cornwall who hit the big time and have enjoyed a fair bit of chart success here in the UK. The second movie – Fisherman’s Friends One And All – came out a couple of months ago and I’m hoping that it will soon be on tv or one of the streaming services. I’ve seen a trailer, and it looks likely to be as enjoyable as the first. In the meantime, a couple of songs from the soundtrack album have been released as videos, including this one:

You couldn’t fail to notice the wonderful Imelda May in that. She has a role in the movie, apparently her first acting part, and from the trailer it looks as though she’ll fit in well. This song is a little removed from the sea shanties which are the band’s staple diet, but it is a lot of fun nevertheless. The band has been together since 1995, singing on the seafront at Port Isaac, until they were ‘discovered’ by the DJ Johnnie Walker in 2009. A record contract followed and their first album reached #9 in the UK. Since then they have appeared in concerts around the country and overseas, and have played the Glastonbury Festival several times. They began as an a cappella outfit but are branching out with some instrumentation: their newest members play guitar and accordion and are amongst those playing on the album version of this track. Keep an eye out for the movie: I’ve no doubt that it will be an entertaining way to pass a couple of hours.

I began this selection with a piece that I described as ‘joyous’ and I think that applies equally well to my closing track. It isn’t usually an adjective used to describe them, but I think it really applies to this:

How’s your Mongolian, then? I left the captions on to help you understand the lyrics, but I have no idea as to their accuracy: they look a little strange in places! The Hu are a Mongolian folk metal band formed in 2016. They use traditional Mongolian instrumentation, including the Morin khuur (the upright square wooden fiddle thing), the Tovshuur (a kind of two or three stringed lute), and Mongolian throat singing. They call their style of music “hunnu rock” – ‘hu‘ inspired by the Hunnu, an ancient Mongol/Turk empire, known as Hünnü in Mongolia, and some of their lyrics include old Mongolian war cries and poetry. Their songs usually incline a little more towards the heavy rock side, and this is one of their lighter tracks: it puts me in mind of the Faun song, Walpurgisnacht, that I shared a few weeks ago in Tuesday Tunes 122, with the dancing going on around a fire. The dancers, by the way, are a troupe called Nature Dance, and they add so much to the joy of this video. This song is from the band’s second album, Rumble Of Thunder, which came out last month with this as a single accompanying it. It has so far only made the charts in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, but their first record, The Gereg, was a success in many countries: it got to #21 here in the UK and even made it to #103 in the US. Their main success has been on YouTube, however: they have 1.42m subscribers there, and this video has already been viewed over 920k times in its first six weeks. To further prove my point, one from two years ago has over 31m views. Now that is good! I think they are amazing, something really different, and above all they are fun. Just one question, though: which one is Roger Daltrey?

I hope you’ve enjoyed this selection of what I have been finding on my travels through YouTube. The beauty of this for me is that, across these six songs, there are six artists who I’ve never played before: only Caroline Jones and Nina Nesbitt have been shared with you until now. I think the others might be making return visits, though. See you again for Song Lyric Sunday – it’s a corker, even if I do say so myself 😊