How did it happen? Stop and blink and suddenly it's a week till Christmas.

Beats me. Time, as we are told, moves faster the older you are. Or appears to, from inside. That's because we – apparently – measure every moment as a percentage of our total life span and as the life span increases so every new bit, whether it be a year or a week, seems, in relative terms, shorter.

Knowing that, unfortunately, doesn't particularly help. 'Time seems to be going faster, Doctor, what can I do?” 'Nothing.”

That's possibly the greatest lesson we learn in life: the slow acceptance of the many things we have absolutely no control over
and never will.

And it seems particularly fitting to be reminded of that at Christmas, a festival that was plonked on the date of a much older festival, both festivals celebrating belief systems which try to give people the reassurance that they have control over things that they really don't. Even if that control comes from praying to a possibly fictitious entity (or entities) in the hope that he/she/it/they will help with those aforementioned things which the people can't control.

A little cynical?

Oh dear. Was that a bit cynical for the pre-Christmas build-up? Perhaps I was spurred on by newspaper reports that in this year's census 1.6 million people identified as having no religion. That's up by a quarter since the last census and seems like a lot. It compares with 1.9 million people who identify as Christian and the gap is rapidly closing...

Anyway, believer or not, it's very nearly Christmas and the one thing we can all agree on is that Christmas is a time for presents, fun and over-indulgence. Should 1.9 million do a bit of worshipping as well, then that's okay with the 1.6 million. Atheists are tolerant people.

And presents...? Being a music column I'm obviously about to suggest musical gifts. CDs in fact. They may be dead in the greater scheme of things but in size, price and convenience they make damned good presents.

And what music is hot right now? Well I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the next big revival will in fact be... a folk revival.

Now I could well be insane, or simply wrong, but here's my thinking: the Coen brothers 2000 film Oh Brother Where Art Thou? had a great traditional soundtrack and spurred a trad revival, the likes of Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Ralph Stanley all benefiting immensely.

The Coen brothers new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, is due out in the early new year. It takes place in early sixties New York - Greenwich Village to be precise - and has a folk soundtrack. And it's so good (rumour has it) that it will start a folk revival. At least that's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.
So, with a fervent desire to make you hipper than hip and give you a chance to jump on this bandwagon before it even leaves the station, I'd like to recommend some folky albums for your listening and giving pleasure.

Here we go...

First up, Norah Jones. And why not? Great voice, cuter than a button and dueting on an album of folk songs with the singer from American punk outfit Green Day Billy Joe Armstrong. It's a weird world. Even weirder is that the album in question – Foreverly – is also a tribute to those not-exactly-folk-singers, The Everly brothers.

Seems that in 1958 The Everly's needed to make one more record to fulfil a contract so produced Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, a bare-bones selection of traditional tunes the siblings knew from childhood that had been popularised by the likes of Gene Autry and Tex Ritter. They weren't even expecting the album to be released, but it was, to little notice or fanfare. Then they went on making mainstream hits.

But the album never quite went away and now Jones and Armstrong have recorded a track-for-track remake. And it's rather wonderful.

Plenty out there

Of course there's a lot of folk music out there, from the defiant folk/punk of England's Frank Turner, to the meditative modernity of Bill Callahan, the trad reinventions of recent visitors to New Zealand Kelly Joe Phelps and Iris Dement, or even the soundtrack of the new Coen brothers film.

There's also the 'Best of 2013” list from fRoots magazine. You can find it at http://frootsmag.com/content/critpoll.
Next week – tickets as gifts.