Tunes (and puppets!) for a Monday morning

One of the loveliest things about growing older in a small Dartmoor village is watching the next generation grow up and take on the world themselves. Last month at the Chagford Film Festival, for example, we had the great pleasure of watching Toby Froud's first puppet movie, Lessons Learned (trailer above). Toby, the son of Brian & Wendy Froud*, grew up in Chagford and now lives with his wife and son in Portland, Oregon. Lessons Learned was made with funding from Heather Henson's Handmade Puppet Dreams, as well as a Kickstarter campaign, and has already won a slew of awards from film festivals in the US and Europe. Chagford puppet master William Todd-Jones performed the character of the "The Boy" in the film, and the music is by his daughter Lillian Todd-Jones and Chagford-resident-at-the-time Gordon Mills Jr. (Film theme song here.)

Lillian, too, is part of that younger generation of artists strongly influenced by their Chagford roots -- although in her case, music-making is just one part of her life, for she's also an Oxford-trained zoologist who has studied lions in the wild in Africa. In the magical video below, shot near Chagford, she teams up with Welsh singer-songwriter Siôn Russell Jones for "Guillotine." (More about the collaboration here.)

Below is one of Lillian's solo songs: "Perfect." This video, too, was shot near Chagford; and Lillian (who is also a visual artist) edited them both. "Perfect" starts out firmly in the folk music genre, but then strays into rock, punk, and blues. If you'd like a little more of her music this morning, go here for Lillian's cover of  "As the World Falls Down" by David Bowie. (The song comes, of course, from the film Labyrinth, in which Toby Froud was the baby in the striped pajamas.)

Next:

Moving from Chagford to Cardiff, Wales (because I love this young man's music), here are two of Siôn Russell Jones' solo videos. The first is "So Long," from his 2013 EP of the same name, which was recorded on Dartmoor.

And last today: The very beautiful "Unholy Ghosts" (which makes me think of the Mock Avenue Studio in Bordertown). It, too, comes from the So Long EP.

If you'd like a little more of Siôn's music, go here (a particularly gorgeous combination of singing and song-writing) and here. There's a Cute Dog Alert on the last one.

* And speaking of the Frouds, Brian and Wendy have a gorgeous new book out, Faeries' Tales.