Running After My Hat

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.