YORK folk-rock musician Joshua Burnell launches his second album, Songs From The Seasons, on Saturday at The Crescent, York, ahead of its release on his own Misted Valley Records label on May 4.

The 14-track record is the culmination of an ambitious project that Joshua began on December 21 2016 in the aftermath of bringing out his debut, Into The Green, that year.

He set himself the challenge of recording and releasing his own arrangement of a traditional song or tune digitally once a week for a year, reflecting the changing seasons as 2017 progressed.

"Someone suggested I should do a blog, and then I saw that musicians like Holly Taymar had been putting home recordings online, so I put the two ideas together, and it ended up with me recording the equivalent of four albums in a year, which is ridiculous really," says Joshua.

"I made the recordings at my home studio, Misted Valley, in Fulford, and also at Teesside University, where Nathan [band member Nathan Greaves] studied and had access to the recording studio, so he engineered the drum recordings there."

Each weekly song in the Seasons Project was released on YouTube, accompanied by a detailed blog on Joshua's website that not only explained the history of the music but also gave details of which artists had played and shaped the material during various folk revivals.

Born to English parents in Annecy in the Alps, Joshua was brought up in Kendal and came to York to study primary education at York St John University. Like many, once in York, he stayed here and he now combines his music-making with teaching part-time at Fishergate Primary School.

His recording project was as much an academic exercise as a musical one, dedicating songs to musicians who had inspired him, from Martin Carthy, Shelagh McDonald and Barry Dransfield to Anne Briggs, Bruce Springsteen and Sandy Denny. He chose folk material mainly from the British Isles but also from Europe, not least translations of ancient Danish ballads and Breton music. Songs were divided into four groups to chart the changing seasons and mark significant events in the traditional calendar.

"My university course and The Seasons Project are the two hardest things I've ever done," says Joshua, who turned 25 on April 5. "Some of the arrangements turned out to be more complex than I'd ever done before.

"Mostly I've written new lyrics too to keep the songs alive and relevant, which is part of the tradition of this genre, where sometimes you find an ending to a lyric that's unfair or you find the way that a character in a song acted didn't do them justice."

The album's opening song, Two Magicians, for example, re-writes a traditional Scottish song, juxtaposing the misogyny of the traditional lyrics with a female-empowered version for the 21st century. Or as Joshua puts it in his sleeve notes: "A long-needed re-write to give that lusty smith a taste of his own medicine". "This time the girl starts getting her own back and scaring him off," he says.

More than 20 musicians took part in the Seasons Project, among them Mostly Autumn's Angela Gordon, on low whistle, Tim Yates, from Blackbeard's Tea Party, on melodeon and bass; singer Frances Sladen; Joshua's guitarist brother Ben; fiddlers Sarah Loughran,Antonio Curiale and Rachel Wilson; guitarist Nathan Greaves; bassist Mark Waters; mandolin player Polly Bolton; double bass player Matthew Metford; mandolin player and electric guitarist Jack Woods; cellist Rachel Brown and flautist Cristina Crespo.

All those players feature on the album, whose track selection does not follow the order of the seasons from spring to winter, which might have been the expected pathway. Instead Joshua jumbles them up, but with all due care and attention, on a record of epic fantasy ballads, fiddle tunes and swirling Hammond organ.

"Even these days, when people of my generation tend to skip from song to song, I believe an album should be album and the song order should have a flow to it, starting high tempo, with a bang; then the ballads, the more reflective ones; then the fireworks display and the 'pub cry' at the end when everyone is swaying with their arms around each other!" he says. "So I tested out the order and imagined the album as one big song to make sure everything was in the right place.

"I also asked friends and family and people who'd followed the project religiously what their favourites were. People really liked Two Magicians and King Of The Fairies and I had my own favourites, like Reynardine The Werefox, so I had to include those.

"Reynardine has been recorded previously by Annie Briggs, Fairport Convention and Jon Boden and my version came from the idea of wanting to arrange a folk song in the style of Yes."

No doubt, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page would approve. "He said Led Zeppelin isn't heavy metal. It's folk music, though it's just that the instruments have changed," quotes Joshua, whose own instrumental skills take in Hammond organ, electric and acoustic guitar, drums, piano, tambourine, bouzouki, accordion, low whistle, whistle, autoharp, percussion and...mellotron.

"I'll be playing mostly Hammond organ and guitar at the album launch," he says. Joining him will be Sladen ("she's our Maddy Prior"), Greaves, Woods, Metford and drummer Ed Simpson, who also will perform with Joshua at the Black Swan Folk Festival in York, June 1 to 3; Beardyfest, Newbury, June 23; Lincoln Folk Festival, July 14; Music On The Marr, Castle Carrock, Cumbria, July 22; FolkEast, Glemham Hall, Suffolk, July 17, and the Great British Folk Festival at Skegness on December 1. Yes, December 1.

"That's just the perfect time for a folk festival!" says Joshua.

Joshua Burnell & Band launch Songs From The Seasons at The Crescent, York, on Saturday, supported by Joska de Langen at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £6 in person from the venue, in The Crescent, or Earworm, in Powells Yard, Goodramgate, or at seetickets.com, or "more on the door".

Charles Hutchinson