Mirah – Take Me Out Riding

Wow, Mirah’s new album The Old Days Feeling is incredible. Very sparse and low-fi, but the songs are fantastic. It’s a compilation album of various rarities and these albums are usually for completest fans only. While there are a few tracks on the album that don’t make much of an impression, most of the tracks are great unpolished pop songs. And there are a bunch of ukulele songs on there. Best of them is the ukulele-riffery of Take Me Out Riding which originally appeared on Pink Skull’s Zeppelin 3.

The song is made of up two main riffs. This one in the verse:

And this one in the chorus:

Buke, UKEit and Ukulele Hero T-Shirts

The baritone ukulele site Buke has been shut down. It did have a note saying it was for copyright reasons (which makes me nervous). I tried to email Roger to find out more, but his email wasn’t working. It’s a real shame to see it go. Anyone know any more?

With the recent UKEit festival, it’s clear good things are happening with the ukulele in Italy. You can pick up a CD of Italian ukulele acts. And there’s an Italian blog with uke chords here including Pink Martini and Hank Williams (don’t scroll too far down if you want to keep things entirely work safe).

A batch of Bluegrass ukulele tabs on Uker Tabs from Ken Middleton.

Treat yourself to a Ukulele Hero T-Shirt (or a Kazoo Hero T-Shirt if that’s more your speed).
UPDATE: Thanks to Jan for pointing out you can get a 25% discount if you sign up on this page (plenty more ‘Hero’ style tees on there too).

Nellie McKay plays her ukulele for TED (Thanks to Paul, Garatth and Catherine from SUJ).

Friend of Uke Hunt, Heather will be hosting a ukulele special on her show on CJSR tonight at 6 p.m., MST. You can listen live here or listen again here (find Q Transmissions).

Hoosierhiver tells you why your ukulele won’t stay in tune.

Mirah’s new album, The Old Days Feeling, is more than a little bit brilliant. There are three uke tracks (Dreamboat, Take Me Out Riding and Birthday Present) and you can download Lone Star free on Amazon.

Map of Bosko and Honey’s Ukulele Safari.

Mike McCready (of Pearl Jam) has a page of ukulele tabs on his site including Soon Forget and The Who’s Blue, Red, Grey. (Thanks to Daniel)

Cool Hand Uke’s iPhone ringtones.

MP3s: New track, Megaman 9, from Tanguy Ukulele Orchestra, Allo, Darlin on Indietracks, Herohill has Jon and Roy’s High on a Hill.

This might be the reason God made sure there was plenty of distance between Hawaii and Australia.

Competitions, Buy a Ukulele, Ukulele Hero

Technical difficulties abound: It looks like there are a few problems with the RSS feed updating. The emails and the feed itself seem to be fine. If you resubscribe by clicking here, it does return the latest posts (hopefully). Also, there was a problem with the tab and chords page in Internet Explorer and now all the tabs and chords are on one page.

Just one day left to enter buy a ukulele contest. But still plenty of time to enter my Review Your Ukulele competition to win a Kala Pineapple.

There’s still work to do on it, but as of now the Buy a Ukulele section of the site is officially open. It’s been prettified and has a load of reviews of various ukuleles (gosh, a lot of people have Lanikai ukuleles).

If you can’t wait until Friday for your ukulele news fix, you should follow Ukulele Hero. He covers everything ukulele related on the web (and I mean everything).

YouTube had a front page covered in ukulele videos earlier this week, along with Ukulala on the YouTube blog and Aldrine on the LA Times blog.

Join JoCo on stage in NYC and uke-out.

Rush’s Closer to the Heart on Uker Tabs.

MP3s: Frekvens has Thos Henley, Stop Okay Go has Mareva Galanter’s version of Bang, Bang, Hero Hill has The Burning Hell and Popsense has Mirah’s Engine Heart.

UOoGB on the Beeb next Tuesday and Saturday. (Thanks to both Garys for that).

Worst film review ever: “Mad Dog Time should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor.”