Hi, so I was introduced to Filk music (excluding The Mechanisms) very recently, and I have absolutely no idea where to start. I want to learn more/ listen to it more. But confused Googling can only get me so far. Do you have any pointers?
We certainly do!
For starters, I’d recommend just browsing our back posts, especially the ones under the links tag, which includes a lot of posts about various resources and collections people have made. Pulling out three in particular:
Elsewhere: The wikipedia article on filk is dry but pretty accurate, and a good resource if you want to learn more about the history and typical present-day practice of filk. You can also check out the filk tag on bandcamp for a hell of a lot of good music, and searching for “filk” on youtube will turn up at least two fairly long playlists.
Followers, if you’ve got any more suggestions for @who-needs-words and anyone else who’s new here, please feel free to reblog this and add them!
Did y’all know that I’m an award-winning singer/songwriter? It’s true! My Wikipedia page even says so! And my first studio album, Stars Fall Home, is available again for Hogswatch! Get your copy here:
New York-based Filker Rhiannon’s Lark just launched the Kickstarter for her new album! One of the songs on the album won the Iron Filker Contest at the Ohio Valley Filk Festival in 2019 (“Lost in Translation”).
As with most musicians and performers (and many others), her income has been severely impacted by the pandemic. Please support this Kickstarter and get some amazing new music!
Also re: that space shanties/filk post from last night, if you want recs outside of the songs linked there please do let me know because I…. have a lot 👀👀👀
Ahhhh okay so @injygo here are a few recs (that weren’t on that – very good – list in the original post!)
Note: these are some of my faves, but you can find more in this post, especially those that aren’t up on youtube. Also search the tag #filk on my blog! ….Also, I realise with this list I’ve sort of drifted away from the ballad/shanty genre a little in my enthusiasm. But since that was what the original post was about (and because it’s my own favourite filk sub-genre!) I’ve tried to keep these space-themed in some capacity… that said, there’s a fair amount of other filk/folk I love that’s more fantasy/mythology themed, often by some of the same artists as the above, so if you want more recs please let me know!!!
Thought I’d put a plug here for the Kickstarter that the Faithful Sidekicks, a really fun and sweet filk duo we met at OVFF last year who make equally fun and sweet music, are running for their new album, Our Kind of Strange
They’ve got previews of several of the songs that you can listen to already (and I feel like many of you need to know that one of them is about a found family of monsters, plus another that’s about spoons/chronic health issues that I love and find deeply relatable) and it looks like it’s going to be a really positive, nerdy album in general.
(This is also a recommendation to check out their other music, too, since they have two albums already on Bandcamp. My favorite song of theirs is probably still Fatty Bolger, which if you’re looking for songs about obscure LotR characters is absolutely perfect.)
