An attempt at the Tracy Chapman song. On my Barron River Milo Ukulele.
Hunter’s Song
So I’ve been wanting to write Hunter’s Song for ages now. I had a song in mind starting with:
They call me Hunter
With my long slender body
And my…
It pretty much stopped there for a while. From time to time, the ideas would pick up again.
A few months ago, I finally put more words in and ended up with this:
They call me Hunter
But you won’t find a rabbit in my mouth
They say looks can kill but mine will break your heart
My long and slender (golden) body
And my oversized paws
There are no laws
When it comes to Hunter.
I always imagined it’d be sung in a Leonard Cohen-ish kind of way. Low. More spoken than sung.
But today, I was strumming around on my ukulele, and I just put stupid words down and made up a tune. It is not at all close to the idea that I started with.
So here is Hunter’s Song.
Beyond the Sea
Just before I left for Scotland, everything electronic seemed to be falling apart.
A simple ukulele comparison
So, I spent a lot of money to get a Kanilea Tenor Ukulele. It’s made of koa. I’ve been talking about it with the maker for some time now and it’s finally here. All the way from Hawaii.
Sumo’s Song
If there’s Leo’s Song, of course, there’ll be one for my Sumo.
The two are really night and day. As I often say (apparently, I like to repeat myself) one is like an Express Stream dog, the other is in Normal Stream with a future in beauty school.
But although Sumo is faster, he gets too excited, too eager, too fast and that makes him rash and behave aggressively.
I did want to record this last week, but over enthusiastically cut nails and equally over enthusiastic strumming gave me a blister on the edge of my finger.
So here I go again, embarrassing myself with an off-key rendition of Sumo’s Song.
The chords are G, D (with a high D), C, D
Leo’s Song
This is a song that I thought up after looking into the blank eyes of Leo, who, after 6 months of training, still isn’t paper trained.
It took me 6 weeks to teach Leo how to shake hands. Now that Leo knows how to shake hands, when I command “down”, he offers his paw.
I did this song in GarageBand, starting by laying down the drum track, then played out the bass track on the computer keyboard.
Then I played the ukulele, sang the song and added the barks.
The chords are F, C5? (CGCG), Am, G
Believe It or Not
Remember The Greatest American Hero?
Ah yes, ordinary man dons a red suit from aliens and suddenly has unmanageable super powers. Can’t remember much from that show, except I looked forward to it every week.
Life was easier then. No one asked about USPs, for Interactive elements, yadda yadda. Just liked it.
I remember visiting my friends in Ipoh and singing the theme song together.
And now that I’ve done it again, I think the range of the song is surprisingly wide and difficult to sing.
I recorded this on different tracks as I found it hard to balance my ukulele with voice. And when I did that, I found it hard to keep the accompaniment in time…
Across the Universe
It’s been a while since I’ve recorded myself singing and I’ve to say, it isn’t pleasant.
To sing, keep time, read lyrics and recall chords is doubly, triply, quaduply hard.
And exhausting.
And actually quite terrible sounding when you hear you can’t sustain notes like you thought you could.
This is my 7th attempt and increasingly I made mistakes as I got tired.
You have been warned.
[audio:https://joanneteo.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Across the Universe.mp3]