Last week we saw Amanda Palmer perform live (and totally drunk-Tweeted her afterward, oops) — but right before the show, we saw her hubby, author Neil Gaiman, read a new, unpublished short story. (To seven hundred freakin’ people, holy shit — some of them queued all day to get a good seat!) Anyway, as a “reward” to his audience for sitting quietly during the hour-long reading (reward, ha — some people had flown halfway across the country for the reading), he introduced his wife, a.k.a. Amanda Fucking Palmer, who performed her ukelele anthem. She brought down the house! Seriously, total standing ovation from the audience.
And she’s only half-kidding about wanting to change the world with the ukelele — check out her introduction to the song in the video above (recorded at the British Library in London), which is a very early live performance of the song. And yep, that’s adoring husband Neil Gaiman holding her lyric sheets. Here’s a taste:
so play your favorite beatles’ song
and make the subway fall in love
they’re only $19.95, that’s not a lot of money
play until the sun comes up
and play until your fingers suffer
play LCD soundsystem songs on your ukulele
quit the bitching on your blog
and stop pretending art is hard
just limit yourself to three chords
and do not practice daily
you’ll minimize some stranger’s sadness
with a piece of wood and plastic
holy fuck it’s so fantastic, playing ukulele
eat your homework with a fork
and do your fruit loops in the dark
bring your etch-a-sketch to work
your flask of jack
your vibrator
your fear of heights
your nikon lens
your mom and dad
your disco stick
your soundtrack from “karate kid”
It goes on and on brilliantly. You can read all the lyrics and download the studio version of the song on her website here.
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FYI, this auto-played in my google reader. Very annoying.
This is my absolutely favourite song ever!