Antwort auf: Tracy Holiday

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jan-lustiger

Registriert seit: 24.08.2008

Beiträge: 10,955

Zum einjährigen Jubiläum des EP-Releases hab ich sowas wie Liner Notes zur EP geschrieben, die sich mit der Frage beschäftigen: Warum diese verdammte Ukulele?

One year ago today, Tracy Holiday’s first EP was released. Good occasion to give it another listen, isn’t it? You can do that below. I thought I should also use the occasion to write a few words about something some people might have been wondering about: Why that damn ukulele?

The ukulele is a criminally underrated instrument. It is quite limited but that doesn’t bother me since I am not interested in musical complexity. To quote PJ Harvey: I’m not a musician, I’m a songwriter. I value lyrics and melodies. Hence, it was a natural decision not to put anything into these songs that would distract from their lyrics and melodies. It’s where their ideas lie. But that’s not the reason I chose the ukulele and I wouldn’t have told you if it was. There is, of course, also a creative reasoning behind that.

I don’t write songs with straight faces. By that I mean that I don’t write happy or sad songs. I write happy sad songs and sad happy songs. Take “The Last Time I Ever Heard Your Voice”: It is a sad song with a positive twist. “When I Grow Up”, however, is a happy song with a negative twist. “Kissing in L.A.” is a sad song with a positive twist that actually makes it kind of sadder. You get the drift.

These twists are mostly ironic. The songs are tragicomedies. And when it comes to tragicomedy, I can’t think of an instrument that is better suited for it than the ukulele is. No one takes it seriously. Some people simply think it’s some sort of joke guitar. And precisely because it isn’t the instrument you’d expect to make you sad, it becomes a tragicomic instrument if it does so anyway. And because it isn’t taken seriously, it also has an innocence you can toy with when playing not-so-innocent songs on it.

And innocence, of course, is something to be found at the very heart of pop music, being deeply rooted in adolescent ideas, feelings and all that. I like to play with clichés in my songs (you can also write better twists if there is a cliché you can subvert) and the whole concept of the EP was to have some (tragicomic) fun with pop songs and their clichés while keeping their emotional core intact – these are, after all, small songs with big hearts. The ukulele enabled me to do exactly that.

That being said, there won’t be any uke on EP #2. Don’t want to repeat myself so fast. And after all, the whole point of this project’s concept was to be able to do some different shit on every new release.

P.S.: I would have loved to also have a toy piano on the EP for these reasons but that didn’t work out.

P.P.S.: A big band version of “When I Grow Up” would be awesome despite all that.

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