I was quite impressed by Billy Corgan’s ukulele playing. He certainly seems to take it more seriously than most of the guitarists who jump on the bandwagon and make a hash of it. For a start, he isn’t using a pick. And he throws in some classic ukulele stuff like diminished chords and a triplet strum. It’s enough to forgive him for playing a Fender and braiding Jessica Simpson’s prayers.
The reason, as can be heard in the full intro to the song, is that he learnt ukulele from a Hawaiian friend. Nice work, Hawaiian Corgan-buddy!
Suggested Strumming
The strumming skips around quite a bit so I’m not going to go through all of it. This is the main one:
d – x u d u x –
Do that for each chord in the verse until the end D7 – G7. Here you get a typical Hawaiian turnaround. Here the C chord doesn’t quite fill the bar. Instead of the final ‘-‘ on the C chord you do an up strum on the D7 chord. So you strum this:
u d u –
And the same for the G7 chord.
In the chorus it’s all triplet strums on the C – Fm moves.
Writing a compelling story is a tricky task. Writing tunes that sound good from the first listen is a huge challenge. Doing both at once is near impossible. Perhaps that’s why there have been so few decent operas in the last century or two.
But the challenge hasn’t stopped Annie Bacon picking up her ukulele and writing her ‘Folk Opera’. And it’s a good job she wasn’t intimidated as it’s a huge success.
I caught up with her to pump some more information out of her.
How long have you been playing the ukulele and how did you get started?
In December of 2008 I was recording some of my friends songs down in Los Angeles, and another friend lent me her uke in case we needed to use it on the songs. I had never played, and didn’t know the proper tuning or the chords patterns, but I just tuned it to an open G and wrote my first uke song two days later. (The exact version you hear in the video of “Why Do They Cry?”) It was love at first strum.
Can you tell us a bit about the Folk Opera, the idea behind it and the story.
The Folk Opera is a story about folks, using folk music to tell the story in an operatic form where everything is sung. It is both a comedy, a tragedy and a love story (between two elders). It is mostly a story about loss – of memory, time, people and places – but also contains within it (as all good tragedies do I think) the kernel of its own triumph.
I don’t know why I wrote it. I just decided I was going to write a folk opera while I was traveling – thought I was making the genre up, turns out I was not. But the story came from two disparate experiences from my earlier years that became the plot around which I created characters, relationships, emotions and histories.
I’ve read The Folk Opera was created during a 6-week trip to the Middle East and Southern Africa. How did these places influence its writing?
The two places influenced the writing in that they gave me a place far away from the life I am so entrenched in here at home. Musically, I deliberately rejected any outside influence as I was trying to stay true to the Americana Folk style. But then of course there was the beauty and the stark different-ness of the two places, which always piques and heightens my creativity.
How is the Folk Opera different from your other performances?
My other project – with a band I call the OSHEN – is pretty much rock n roll. There are some folk/Americana influences for sure, but it’s mostly rock. The instrumentation is almost all electric, and I play the guitar. Also the music I write for the OSHEN is typically very personal and reflective on my own life and experiences while the Folk Opera was a world entirely without myself, and entirely acoustic. Right now it’s performed with ukulele, upright acoustic bass, and fiddle with 3 different singers.
In addition to my own projects I sing with the Elationists Centennial Band (www.elationists.org), and with Savannah Jo Lack (www.savannahjolack.com), and I play upright bass with Wolf + Crow (www.myspace.com/wolf.n.crow). In all of these I am a player only and not a songwriter, which provides a nice balance to the other projects.
What was your most unforgettable experience with regards to the Folk Opera?
Two things come to mind:
First, a most memorable morning while I was staying at a friend’s place in northern Namibia in a little cottage on the Teachers’ College campus. Late in the morning I woke up humming melodies and with twitching fingers. I barely had time to get my computer open to record what was coming out. With Africa out my window, three songs (one of which I think is the best song in the Folk Opera) just rushed out in a matter of minutes, as though my fingers knew the chords, and my lips knew the words from a long time ago.
The second was after a performance we did at a little spot in San Francisco. It was not our best show ever – things were loose for sure. But at the end the drummer for the band playing after us came up to me and he had tears streaming down his face and he was just looking at me, like he didn’t even know what to say but felt compelled by the enormity of his emotion to try to say something. My goal with all of my music is to make people feel things (anything) and this was a stunning moment of realizing success in my goal.
What plans have you got for The Folk Opera and for your own music?
For the Folk Opera our plan is to get it on a stage in the next year. There are still a couple of more songs to write to really flesh out the body of it and to bring it to full length. There’s also a lot of orchestration left to get down. I think one of the ideas is to get it on A Prairie Home Companion, a popular radio show here in the States. Ultimately, though, I want to put it down in such a way that anyone anywhere can pick it up and perform the whole thing completely on their own.
As for the OSHEN – I’m just back from a West Coast tour. The plan here is to just keep playing as long as people will keep listening. More recording, touring, writing, performing; lather, rinse and repeat.
If you want to make sure the opera makes it onto vinyl you can pre-order stuff via Kickstarter (I have done so I can wholeheartedly recommend you do to).
You might have already had a sneak preview of this post, but here’s the finished article.
Today’s tube includes Ukulollo with Siwar from Ukuleles for Peace. They’re currently offering a pineapple ukulele for the best ukulele song. You can find out more in this video.
Also featured is Miss Jess. Her fantastic EP, Jammin’ at Jacksons, is now available on iTunes so you have no excuse for not picking up at least a couple of tracks (Philadelphia and Finally Mine are indispensable).
Also up is Salwa Azar, Zooey Deschanel, some blinding bluegrass and plenty more.
I’ve probably missed a bunch of videos while I’ve been away on holibobs so I hope you’ve been following UkeToob.
There’s another video you should be aware of: Eliza Doolittle’s Skinny Genes. Looks like she’s being set up as the English Miley Cyrus.
I didn’t know much about Locals ukuleles but Noela Castro left a comment on the site with some info, “Aloha, I am the maker of Locals Ukuleles. I work out of home garage in Makakilo-Oahu, Hawaii. Just a little about myself and how I got started. I started back in 1996 with K.C. Moore of Kelii Ukulele Company. Kelii just started his company about 2 month before I started with him. It’s been 12 years of helping him to build the Kelii product to a household name in this industry. Every ukulele that went through there had my detail finish on it. Along with shaping all necks, which after got its final C & C machine made copies, to bridge design, head stock, intonation and so on. In 2008 it was time for me to move on and fulfill my own dreams and goals. So here we are today, “Locals” Is just one label I started. In May of 2010 be on the look out for “Ka’Ohana” Ukuleles. I am proud to say as a 60% blood Hawaiian, that these ukuleles have a true Hawaiian sound with the finest quality of craftsmanship. And, to all of you who bought one of my ukulele’s, I say with much Aloha and Mahalo for keeping our culture and heritage alive today. Aloha ”
In the last window shop I mentioned the suspiciously cheap Ashbury AU-34S. Brian sent me a message with his experience, “I bought an Ashbury all Koa Tenor at Hobgoblin a couple of years ago for
£150. The wood is sooooo thick (perhaps 3rd grade koa can’t be cut thin). It has a built in amp that runs of a 9v battery which weighs a lot, and it has machine head tuners like the AU-34S. It is as heavy as a brick! But to be fair it does sound good.”
Bossarocker is doing a ukulele show for Chorlton Arts Radio (a non-profit community radio station) and is looking for people to contribute their ukulele tracks to be played on the show. If you want to be featured, you can find more details here.
I’m not quite sure what’s going on with Le Soir’s Ukulele Sessions. The old site disappeared. A new one has reappeared here. But I couldn’t get any of the videos to work.
In the emails: In response to the birthday post, Dave made a great suggestion: “A uke ‘learning’ community / forum”. I think it’s a really interesting idea to have a forum that’s solely based on helping people play better but I’m not sure if it would take off. I’d love to know what you think of the idea in the comments.
The site is three years old today. I was originally going to do a review of the year but I decided to give that a post of its own and stick with the annual self-indulgent post.
Stats
The number of people visiting the blog continues to make me feel woozy whenever I think about it. The third year of the blog saw 2.1 million visitors and 10 million page views. There are over 3,500 subscribers. All of which are well up on last year’s stats which you can see in last year’s round-up.
A massive thanks to everyone who visits the site. And thanks in particular to everyone who gets invloved by commenting, emailing and mentioning the site around the net. Knowing that people appreciate the site and find it helpful really makes the difference when I feel like packing it in.
Visitors by Country
1. United States (more than all the others put together)
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. France
5. Australia
6. Germany
7. New Zealand
8. Sweden
9. Japan
10. Ireland
Coming Up (Or Not)
Will Happen
More ebooks: I’ve been promising How to Play Classical Ukulele and How to Shred the F**k Out of a Ukulele for an age now. I had blocked out the Christmas break for writing How to Shred… but events took over.
In the spirit of getting things done, making commitments and scaring the crap out of myself, I’ll set the release dates:
How to Play Classical Ukulele – July 1st 2010 How to Shred the F**k Out of a Ukulele – November 3rd 2010
Feel free to kick me in the arse if I miss these.
Fewer Posts: Cutting down on the Monday posts hasn’t caused a single protest so I’ve decided to stop posting on Sunday as well (for now).
Might Happen
More Uke Hunt T-Shirts: The nightmare of finding a decent site to put the last batch of Uke Hunt t-shirts has made me hate the idea of t-shirts. But since the redesign I’ve had a lot of requests for them.
Taking How to Play Ragtime Ukulele off the market: I’m not sure if it’s up to the standards of the other ebooks any more.
Ukulele Applications: I’ve never bothered to properly learn any computery stuff. Along the way I’ve picked up enough HTML, CSS and PHP to break things but nowhere near enough to fix anything. So I’ve committed myself to learning these things (I might even tackle Ruby on Rails but only because I have a man-crush on David Heinemeier Hansson).
If I manage to get any good at PHP, I have a bunch of ideas for apps I want to make – most of the uke related. If any of them are actually any good, I’ll share them here. And if anyone has any advice on learning this stuff, let me know.
A Real Life Book: Not for the first time, there are talks of me working on a real life book. This one I’m really excited about. Although it’s very early days and, on past experience, it’s very unlikely to happen.
Definitely Won’t Happen (Probably)
EUkulele: I had a great idea: travel around Europe and meet a ukulele player in every country in the EU. Then I remembered I hate traveling, am terrible at meeting people and am organisationally incompetent. Idea ditched.
Sponsorship and Ads: I get offers for these but there’s no way. Mostly because I piss everyone off sooner or later. The one exception is the search page. Since the redesign I’ve been using Google Site Search because it’s far better than the usual WordPress site search. The down side is the ads. I could pay to have them taken off but, with it being a big site, it’s a pretty hefty cost. I don’t make any money off the ads myself, so don’t click them to do me a favour or anything like that.
If you want to sway me on any of these or you’ve got any good ideas for what I should be doing, let me know in the comments.
90s flashback this week with videos from Billy Corgan and Eddie Vedder (channeling John Lennon for the benefit of Conan O’Brien). Also this week, a new song in the UOGB repertoire, a Neutral Milk Hotel ukulele cover band, Taimane in her back yard (she’s so great when she’s not trying so hard) and plenty more.
