The bigger some project or product is, the more difficult we assume it must have been to bring off properly. Apocalypse Now is not just a bigger deal literally than a two-minute Looney Tunes cartoon; it’s also more “significant” (by most measures).
So what motivates a legitimate musician decide to specialize in an instrument like the ukulele, its image stamped in popular imagination by OMG-you-can’t-be-serious performers like Arthur Godfrey and Tiny Tim? Singer-songwriter Sophie Madeleine (that’s her newest album’s cover at the right) explains the appeal for her, for the Brighton Source:
Though she started on the piano, before teaching herself the guitar, it was finding that small, four-stringed instrument that made her feel at home. “To begin with I used to play jazz/soul/blues sort of stuff,” she says. “I was doing that for quite a while and then picked up the ukulele and realised that my vocals were better suited to folk because my voice is quite quiet, or delicate or whatever. When I picked up the ukulele the genre I was in changed and everything slotted into place.”
But as someone who considers herself a songwriter first and a singer second (“Singing was just something I had to do to show people my songs,” she reckons), does having four strings make composing more tricky? “I wouldn’t say it’s more difficult or easier,” she says. “It’s just different. Which is why I liked it. There’s only so much you can do so it’s down to the bare bones of the song. If you can make a song sound full and good on a ukulele with just your voice then you’ve written a good song. And because I learnt it as I was going, half the time I didn’t know what chord I was playing so I was discovering new chords that I didn’t know existed.”
The answer to “Why specialize in the ukulele?” sounds a bit like the reason why poets take up haiku: the challenge of using a seemingly simple instrument to plumb unexpected depths — or even to achieve, in the listener, effects not at all possible just by piling on more sound.
Aside: If you’ve ever written tens of thousands of words for a single book, you probably know the difficulty of suddenly turning around and writing short. But it’s not unrewarding, exactly: you’ve just gotten used to (read, maybe, spoiled by) the novel’s lavish canvas of action, emotion, meaning. Nothing about any of those values requires depiction on a grand scale, any more than a jewel requires a grand setting. And it’s similarly difficult: you just have to spend more time in the cutting. Any flaws you miss or let slide will be magnified enormously, not swallowed up and blurred over in a mass of text.
Here’s Madeleine performing her single “Stars” (which appears around the Web, sometimes, as “The Stars”):
[Lyrics]
For a completely different feel, here’s “You Are My Favourite” — in which Madeleine suddenly finds herself joined by a host of other ukulele aficionados from around the world:
I agree with Madeleine that the ukulele’s sound suits her voice, which itself doesn’t qualify as, y’know, a Big Instrument. (It reminds me a little of Lenka’s (featured here).) And generalizations about scale and importance can be a bit tricky: the smallest beauties generally can’t sustain the biggest meanings. I don’t want to ascribe more significance to these pieces than they can hold without bursting.
Still, well, there’s a reason why full symphony orchestras include a triangle. By the same token, I love that music’s stage has room for performers like this, and songs like hers.
Froog says
Well, perhaps The Day of the Ukulele is upon us. Four people I know in Beijing play the instrument. Which, outside of the professional musicians, is four of the six people I know who play an instrument. I suppose its compact dimensions suit “travellers”.
John says
When I was reading around about Sophie Madeleine, I found an online feature addressing the “How come all the ukuleles all of a sudden?” question. It did indeed mention the flood of “cheap but playable” ukuleles coming out of China recently.
The Day of the Ukulele made me laugh. I really want that to be a movie, and I’m inclined less to a thriller about an inept Clouseauvian assassin by that code name than I am to a science-fiction B-grade picture about an invasion of parasitical string instruments.
Froog says
To be followed by Night Of The Lepus. Now that would be quite a double bill!
John says
There’s probably a movie-list post for you in this: “[insert unit of time] of the [insert noun, collective or otherwise]” films. For the moment I can think of:
I’m sure you could use these to drive a weekend film festival in any major city in the world!
John says
Whoa. Interesting treatment of bulleted lists in this theme… Not sure I like it. May need to tinker, when there’s a free moment!
P.S. to Froog: reCaptcha just offered up its first proposed character name in a long time: Jane Viderta.
Froog says
Perhaps a bit too limiting to focus only on horror. I wonder about a countdown of films with progressively shorter time periods included in their titles. No-one seems to have filmed One Hundred Years Of Solitude yet, and I wonder if Storm of the Century is a bit of a cheat.
But there’s lots more to choose from:
Seven Years In Tibet
A Month In The Country (Or did I just imagine that one? Can’t find it on IMDB!)
28 Days Later
127 Hours
Three Days Of The Condor
The Day Of The Locust
Rush Hour
Two-Minute Warning
Gone In 60 Seconds
What do you see Jane Vierta as? A smalltown librarian with a hidden past?
Froog says
Annoyed I missed out…
The Year of Living Dangerously
55 Days At Peking
and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes…
Nance says
Keeping it in proportion: Cute. Real cute (as opposed to Very cute).
I’ve come to think of this genre as Juno Music. What I like about it, what everyone fell in love with in the soundtrack of “Juno,” is that these kids we have thought of as born satirists and jaded cynics, still have the innocent hearts of eight year olds. Awww to that part. And they are aware of the irony in this revelation.
I think. Aren’t they?
John says
Interesting riddle. Can irony be un-self-conscious? Can any performer be truly innocent? (If we know real-world innocents, surely there must be celebrity innocents… right?)
I think “Juno Music” captures it perfectly. In my mind’s eye, I can sorta see one of the film’s squiggly-lined animations in the background of either of these songs.
Sophie Madeleine herself seems almost painfully awkward and uncertain of herself on-camera. I noticed that several videos on her YouTube channel feature stop-motion effects, which (whatever else they do) require almost no movement. She also has done a number of the multiple-videos-in-one-screen things, a technique which diffuses the watcher’s attention on any one frame. I don’t want to read too much into this, though.
A review of a 2010 live appearance in NYC said:
That sounds about right to me.
Jayne says
She’s sweet, with a sweet voice. As sweet as Doris Day.
I’m not much of a ukulele fan, but I agree–it does suit her voice, which has an almost vintage feel to it. I’d love to hear something a bit more, um, dimensional, from her, and I wonder if she has the pipes to really belt it out like Day.
The Stars piece is really pretty. :)
John says
Doris Day, huh? I can see that, sort of.
I thought that one bit of the interview I quoted above was interesting — where she says she didn’t take up singing in order to be a singer, but rather in order to get her songs, like, out there. That never even occurred to me as the main reason reason why someone might sing (possibly/probabaly a failure of imagination on my part!). But it could certainly be related both to how she sings, and the awkwardness I mentioned in my comment to Nance, above.
“Stars” has an official video out, but I really liked the sound of this version.
Another recommendation, if you’re interested in hearing her voice in other settings: the YouTube playlist for her “30 Covers in 30 Days” project, which she undertook this past summer leading up to the release of her most recent album.