With currently 359k subscribers, singer, songwriter, and YouTuber, Lydia Buckley (or Lydia The Bard) is most well known for her rewriting of classic princess songs and turning them villainous.
Her passion for music was made apparent when she was young; she loved Lea Salonga and the musical Miss Saigon. Lydia The Bard described watching Lea Salonga sing the song “Sun and Moon” from the musical as being a big inspiration for her.
In terms of her musical career, Buckley described herself as being quite busy juggling both YouTube and a regular full-time job, but she described the feeling that overwhelms her when she’s inspired. “I’d say my inspiration is the joy I find when I hit a creative flow,” Buckley said. “Whether that’s recording covers or writing songs.”
On her website, Buckley mentioned that the Disney princesses as villains idea was originally a passion project. She came up with this idea by chance while recording a cover of the song Arabian Nights from Aladdin when she came upon a piece of Jasmine fanart that made her somewhat evil. Buckley was inspired and she uploaded a cover of the song as well as a story in the description. The rewritten song is about what would happen if Jasmine took over her hometown Agrabah and her rise to evil after killing Jafar, locking up her father in prison, and rejecting Aladdin to run the kingdom by herself.
Lydia The Bard’s YouTube channel features other rewritten versions of Disney songs such as Part of Your World (The Little Mermaid), Mother Knows Best (Tangled), Once Upon a Dream (Sleeping Beauty), I’ll Make a Man Out of You (Mulan), I Won’t Say I’m in Love (Hercules), How Far I’ll Go (Moana), We Don’t Talk About Bruno (Encanto), For the First Time in Forever (Frozen), Touch the Sky (Brave), Journey to the Past (Anastasia), So This is Love? (Cinderella), Tale as Old as Time (Beauty and the Beast), Almost There (The Princess and the Frog), What Else Can I Do (Encanto) and This Wish (Wish).
While all of Buckley’ssongs are to the beat of the original, the lyrics do vary from the original song in order to convey the evil nature of her rewritten characters. For example, in her retelling of Tale as Old as Time, one of the most famous lines was “I have not spent my life reading books, my hours studying to be some desperate prince’s lonely wife. Wanna lock me away, well by all means have your fun with that but I will be the author of my life!”
Buckley expressed how much she loves it when fans ask her questions about the lyrics she’s chosen. “I love lyric questions! I spend lots of time writing lyrics so if a fan ever has any questions about those it makes me happy.”
When it comes to the anxieties surrounding her music, Buckley described worrying about her YouTube channel suddenly collapsing. “Given I work on social media, I am at the mercy of algorithms and that’s a worrying thing! I can get irrationally stressed and kinda have to regularly remind myself that I make things because I enjoy it and have been so blessed to do what I do already that should it all collapse I’ve had a good run!”
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Lydia The Bard’s social media platforms include her website lydiathebard.com, her YouTube channel “Lydia The Bard,” Apple Music, Spotify, Pinterest, Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), Discord and TikTok.
