Ukulele Fans: I’m Not Scared Anymore

A few more weeks and a couple more songs in the can.

Julie helped me out on one of them and the other was helped out by… me! Hooray for multitrack recording. Let’s listen together.

The songs can be found here:
https://www.nicehat.org/ukulele/Im_Not_Scared_Anymore/

The first song is a cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “Authority Song” which is a really kickass song. It’s about someone in a club with a DJ or jukebox where the primary character is trying to ask someone to dance and is trying to work through the nervousness. There are many musical references in the song including the title which is a John Cougar Mellencamp song. “JAMC Automatic” which refers to The Jesus And Mary Chain and their album from 1989. I’m not sure if “What Goes On” refers to the Beatles song or the Velvet Underground one, though. In any case, it’s a great song from a great album from a great band, and it was fun playing this one and singing it with Julie. There’s a lot of harmony throughout this song, but we played it kinda sparser. Even still, there’s enough overlapping of some of the parts that I used a little multitracking in Garageband to get it right.

The second song is a cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “Your House” which is off the same album. This one’s kind of a downer song as it appears to be towards the end of a date at the end of a relationship. There’s a bit of harmony in the refrain and I overdubbed myself in Garageband to do it, and I think I did alright. This is one of Julie’s favorite songs (and it has a very nice and fairly easy to play chord pattern), so it was an easy choice to do.

These two songs are from the superlative Jimmy Eat World album which was either “Bleed American” or self-titled depending on when you got it. The album title (and first track) were renamed out of respect for the September 11 attacks, though it was moved back to the original names for the deluxe 2-cd rerelease in 2008. I picked the title for the EP as “I’m Not Scared Anymore” which is a line from “Authority Song”.

The equipment is the same so far: I did all the recording in Apple’s GarageBand using the microphone from Rock Band (it’s USB, after all) and a Tascam US-122 fancy mixer dealie which has two 1/4″ instrument cable inputs and two XLR microphone inputs and goes out through USB. I still can’t find my XLR microphone. The ukulele is the “Surf Flea” from Flea Market Music that has a passive pickup built in so I can play amplified or record directly. The chord arrangements I used for “Authority Song” and “Your House” are on ultimate-guitar.com.

If you liked these, check out the last release: “This Is What You Get“