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Musicians like the past. They like to take a deep sniff of an old vinyl 7" and imagine they can inhale the dust and inspiration right off it and use it to create something truly timeless. And often they're quite right.

When was putting together his hip hop opera The Defamation of Strickland Banks, he put on a suit and started singing like , to win over as broad an audience as possible. When recorded Back to Black, gave her songs a Motown-ish backing for very similar reasons. It's not all and his ancient recording booth.

More recently, that crate-digging impulse has given rise to a generation of singers and songwriters that aren't so much raiding their parents' record collections as surfing through streaming media, looking for inspiration from long ago.

Leon Bridges is a perfect example, with his affection for '60s clothes and that old school rhythm and blues sound, as showcased on a recent Later... with Jools Holland:

However, the very next day, he appeared in session for Lauren Laverne on 6 Music, and admitted that he'd never really listened to or - the artists he is most often compared to - until relatively recently, but once he did, the music he'd been making to himself started to make a lot more sense.

He said: "When I started writing, before I started to persue this sound, I wrote a song about my mother - Lisa Sawyer - and a friend of mine asked me if Sam Cooke was one of my inspirations. I felt bad because I had never really listened to his music, so I started listening to him and a little bit of and started to see that that sound is where I needed to be all along."

And it's not about the history as such - "I'm no soul disciple, I don't know much about soul music" - it's all about the sound: "I just love how the soul music back then wasn't vice-oriented. It was a very simple sound but still powerful."

Listen to the entire thing here, especially the pared-down acoustic versions of Better Man and Coming Home.

And that affection for the vintage days of soul and jazz is something that keeps cropping up in new singing talent. We've already seen take a similarly uncluttered and vintage sound (and a voice influenced by the blues growl of ) to huge audiences, and have been very quick to credit '50s doo wop as a key influence.

As if to further prove the point, recently appeared on Later... with Jools Holland singing this early jazz standard, which was probably made most famous by :

So that's a new singer singing a new cover of an old cover of an even older song.

Of course, the benchmark for all modern soul upstarts is still Janelle Monae and her monochrome funk revue, drawing on the showmanship of . Her music often sounds like four records playing at once, but as this is a matter of immaculate taste, they have to be the right records, sitting beautifully together: