Mara Carlyle - Baby Bloodheart

Mara Carlyle - Baby Bloodheart (Tab)

After writing about her on Monday, I immediately started working on this tune and was given a further boot up the backside by Susan ex-Tobacco.

The song is fairly easy-going on the left hand. You don’t need your left hand at all for vast parts of it. The right hand might require a little more work. Carlyle uses her thumb to play all the notes. This works well enough for most of the song but, I have to say, verges on the utterly insane for the tremolo section (the ‘Oh my God, I can hardly breathe section’). She just about manages to pull it off but I strongly recommend you use your index finger. This will make the timing much easier to control.

Buy Baby Bloodheart UK

On second thoughts, if you’re in the US don’t buy it there - the import price is the equivalent of launching a rudimentary space program. Get it on iTunes instead.

If this is your first visit here, you can find the chords/tab in those posts by clicking on the song title in red.

Mara Carlyle

There are some inventions so perfect and unlikely that their inception can only be put down to a moment of pure genius. For example, who was it who first stood on beach, looked down at the sand and thought, “You know, I reckon if we melt that down we could see through that.”? And who was it that got so bored one winter’s evening that they went rummaging through the tool shed and decided to play a saw with a violin bow and created a ghostly wail. Luckily for us they did as musical saw and ukulele make a near perfect combination.

The British electronic music scene isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a saw and ukulele player but the entire genre can be justified for producing one, Mara Carlyle. Carlyle has appeared on records by Plaid and Matthew Herbert. Her scene stealing vocals quickly earned her a record deal. She released her debut album, The Lovely (sadly not a Debbie McGee concept album), in 2004 and the fantastically named EP I Blame Dido a year later.

But she first came to to my notice with her uke and saw version of Jamie Lidell’s Game for Fools (which appeared on his album of remixes Muliply Additions). The original version of the song is an Otis Reading style but from Carlyle’s version you’d think it was written for ukulele. It’s a masterclass in ukeing up song.

Buy Mara Carlyle