Sixteen variations march this tune forward three hundred years, from a harpsichord in a candlelit room to a pop diva on an arena stage. Having run out of decades, there was nowhere left to go but round again—so here is the 2030s, which turn out to sound remarkably like 1350.

Bardcore is a real genre, and a young one. Some time in 2020, with most of the world shut indoors and short of things to do, musicians began rearranging familiar songs as though they had been written six hundred years earlier: lute, hurdy-gurdy, recorder, psaltery, a tabor keeping time, and not an electric anything in earshot. The lyrics usually got dragged backward too, into a cheerful approximation of Middle English that no medieval person would recognize but every modern one finds funny.

It spread the way these things do. A German musician, Cornelius Link, was making medieval instrumental treatments of familiar tunes, among them the one from the coffin-dance meme. Then a Canadian working under the splendid name Hildegard von Blingin' sang over his arrangement of "Pumped Up Kicks," dragging the words backward into faux Middle English as she went (which is excellent, by the way; hear it here). That combination—his instruments, her voice and vocabulary—is the genre. She followed it with a version of Radiohead's "Creep" retitled "Ye Olde Creep," and the thing had a name before the summer was out. Some people call it tavernwave, but I like bardcore better.

So my prediction is this: Popular music has spent the last several decades mining its own past—the seventies revived the fifties, the nineties revived the seventies, and by now every decade with a recording industry has been strip-mined at least twice. There is nothing left. The only unexploited century is the fourteenth, and it has a considerable advantage: nobody alive remembers it well enough to complain. I give it until about 2032 before the charts are wall-to-wall hurdy-gurdy, and I intend to be able to say I predicted it in 2026.

Everything old is new again. What comes around, comes back around—and this album, having walked the long way through three hundred years to get here, ends up a few centuries earlier than it started.

The words are my mother's, unchanged in sense and shifted only in spelling and vocabulary; her pun survives the journey intact, and arguably reads better as whippe povre Wille than it ever did in modern English.

A whippoorwille upon a hille
At gloaming makes me dreamy.
But whippoorwille whan all is stille
At dawning makes me screamy!

If Sire but wille whippe povre Wille
And not bid Dame to do it,
Methinks that I—at least I'd trye—
Might calmly slepe right through it.

But as the sonne proves day's begonne
That birde beginth to chatter.
It frighteth me. What may it be?
Whatever is the matter?

If Wille be bad, methinks his Dad
Would settle him, and not
Cry "Whippe povre Wille!" from our hille
With all the lungs he's got.

Perchance 'tis so he doth not knowe
How all unfaderly he
Would make one thinke that throaty gink
Must very surely be.

For if he did, he'd take that kid
Yclept Wille, and he'd spank it,
And let me slepe as sonnebeams crepe
My head above the blanket!