I probably spend too much time on YouTube, which is how I stumbled across music’s hottest new trend: Bardcore, in which modern songs are played on flutes, drums and various medieval stringed instruments. It started in April, when someone going by the name Cornelius Link made a version of a tune called “Astronomia” with medieval instruments. It spread as quickly as the coronavirus, and he soon released “Pumped Up Kicks” in an instrumental version. Hildegard von Blingin’ (a play on 12th-century German composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen) added period lyrics — I had to look up bully-rooks, having forgotten Shakespeare’s use of the term for Falstaff — and the trend took off. The YouTuber creates her covers in a small bedroom studio, using “a Celtic harp, a handful of recorders and whistles” and digital medieval instrument samples.
Now you can find scores of similar efforts by various YouTubers, but this one is still the best.
Another song that lent itself to the treatment is Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” which sounds very close to the original.
