Monday, January 27, 2025
Time: 7:50 AM
Song: Angel Dream No. 4
Artist: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Mode of Consumption: Listening to MP3s on the way to work. (Also, two passes through the song tonight while practicing Ukulele.
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/0tFF03AX223mZHNmMhnBvQ?si=d8506502e1ce4911
This song comes on and I crank the volume on our Jeep’s radio. Do I like this song? Sure, but that’s not the only reason I turn it up.
For the last few years, I have been blundering my way through learning the Ukulele. Jodi and I took one three-hour course at Sauk Valley Community College near the end of COVID that included the instrument as part of the admission fee.
My memory of the class is that the instructor wasn’t able to get into the room early, so he spent most of the first half of the class trying to teach the basics while also trying to restring a Uke for the one left-handed person in the class.
Each person received a little book with a handful of songs. He’d turn to a page, give a quick demonstration on what to do, and then tell everyone to try it. He’d walk around and maybe comment, but that was about the extent of the instruction. Before I knew it, the time was up.
Needless to say, I didn’t get a ton from that crash course into playing an instrument. I have no other real background in music. I have a vague memory of a class in junior high where we each sat at a keyboard, but I don’t remember ever really learning anything in it. I must have passed the class, but I couldn’t tell you a damn thing that I learned.
Everything else is basic stuff from grade school music classes where I wasn’t the most diligent pupil.
Of course, in my teen years, I started to dream of being a rock star, fiddled with an electric guitar I borrowed from the husbanrd of my cousin for a few months, but never really learned how to do anything with it.
So, now I take my limited instruction on the Uke, and I strum away, hoping what happens sounds something like the songs I am attempting.
Angel Dream is one of the songs I found online, and it has a pretty basic chord arrangement. I like to think I sound OK playing, but when I turn it up in the Jeep, I wonder if I am even close. I doubt it.
It seems likely I won’t be the next big Uke star on YouTube. Heck, I don’t think I’ll ever have the guts to record myself playing much less be willing to show it to anyone else.
Still I practice, usually three or four times a week for a half hour or more. Flipping through a growing binder of songs. Maybe I am not good at it, but there is something therapeutic about it. For a few minutes, I am not just some working stiff. I am a guy that can play an instrument, maybe around a campfire with my friends singing along, or at club with a hundred people listening intently, wondering what obscure pop song I’ll play next.
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