Thank you for joining us for On a Positive Note.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and each month I'm sitting down with a songwriter, recording artist, or music insider to learn how music can lift our spirits and heal our hearts.

Music is a great tool for bringing people together and during the days of the

lockdown, the Marsh family from Kent, England, began sharing song parodies to express what they

were going through. As it turns out, they were exactly what we needed and their viral videos

now have received more than 30 million views. They were dubbed the Vaughn Trapped family by the New York Times,

and today I'm sitting down with parents Ben and Daniel Marsh

to talk about how their family's humorous approach to the pandemic

helped them keep their own sanity while turning their family into a global sensation.

Danielle and Ben, welcome to On a Positive Note.

Hi.

Thank you.

Oh, I'm so excited to have you here.

I've been watching you on YouTube all through the pandemic.

And, you know, you really changed the pandemic experience for so many people.

And the world has fallen in love with your family.

So I want to know, to start it out, was your family already singing together before the lockdown?

Yes. Not to the same degree and not with a camera normally. It was just something that we

did from when the kids were really little, actually. Yeah, I think I've said it before, but it was always a very cheap Christmas present for grandparents. And we could kind of rally them to do some sort of, it was normally musicals, wasn't it, that we got them to do in the days gone by when they were little. And it's lovely to look back at because none of them could say any of the words. And it was just, you was just for us it was our family album yes it started off with playing songs with the kids singing along like

like lots of people do bad guitar playing and that sort of thing and then it grew into something that

we'd occasionally share with family on Facebook and then we made one of them public I think on

Facebook because some of our family were saying this is really good you should available. And that's, that was when everything really kicked off at the start of the pandemic, yeah. Yeah, I think we were just right at that moment when there was nothing to fill the airwaves and everyone was really scared and at home and not knowing what to do. And we'd sort of, the week before everybody locked down in, in England, we'd sort of pulled our kids from school and sort of said, right, okay, what are we going to do? There was nothing. So, yeah, we just got the instruments out and had a bit of a go at a song. And then it seemed like a nice thing to do for my mum's birthday, which we realized we weren't going to see her for. And then, yeah, that was it, really. We went to bed one night and you were supposed to be in the States at a conference and a friend that you had been planning to meet said, oh, that song that you put up, it's brilliant, can I share it? And we sort of went, yeah, okay, went to bed, woke up the next morning. And they were millions of you. It was totally bizarre. You truly were an overnight sensation. And talk about

...