Born the daughter of California-based missionaries in 1986, Nataly Dawn spent a good portion of her childhood attending Lycées Français in France and Belgium prior to returning to the States to study art and literature at Stanford.  A multi-instrumentalist, it was at Stanford that she met her future partner (and fellow multi-instrumentalist) Jack Conte.

After graduation the couple had the idea of performing, recording and editing popular songs and then distributing their “VideoSongs” on YouTube directly from their Corte Madera home. And so in 2008 they formed Pomplamoose, an English approximation of pamplemousse, the French word for grapefruit.

According to Conte, they also gave themselves a couple of rules to perform by: “What you see is what you hear, no lip-syncing for instruments or voice – (and) – If you hear it, at some point you see it, no hidden sounds.”

By the following year they had sold over 100,000 songs. And with only a few live performances (and the occasional television commercial) Pomplamoose has since acquired over 337,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel, …which (as of this month) has received more than 85 million viewings.

Written by Freddie Mercury, and covered here as a solo by Nataly Dawn, this song was originally the first track on Queen’s 1980 album “The Game”

 LISTEN TO THIS SONG – Saturday 16 February

Play the Game

 Open up your mind and let me step inside

Rest your weary head and let your heart decide

It’s so easy when you know the rules

It’s so easy all you have to do

Is fall in love

Play the game

Everybody play the game of love

When you’re feeling down and your resistance is low

Light another cigarette and let yourself go

This is your life

Don’t play hard to get

It’s a free world

All you have to do is fall in love

Play the game, everybody play the game of love

My game of love has just begun

Love runs from head down to my toes

My love is pumping through my veins

Driving me insane

Come, come, come play the game

 This is your life – don’t play hard to get

It’s a free world all you have to do is fall in love

Play the game, everybody play the game of love