Sunday, February 08, 2009

3 Years Worth of Beatles Covers on Ukulele... in progress

There's an ambitious project going on called The Beatles Complete on Ukulele, in which every single Beatles original (all 185 of them!) will be covered by various artists on ukulele with one being released every Tuesday. This started a few weeks ago and will continue every week up until July 24, 2012, which roughly coinciding with the start of the London 2012 Olympics. WOW.

The Beatles Complete on Ukulele was devised by music producers Roger Greenawalt and David Barrett after they had organized and performed in a benefit concert in December where over 100 singers and musicians performed all 185 Beatles songs over 14 hours. Then they took the "HUNDREDS of dollars" they raised, put it in a brown paper bag, and handed it over to philanthropist/World's Richest Man, Warren Buffett. What he intended to do with the money may surprise you. Warren's son, Peter, is one of the contributing artists who put forth a nice cover of You Never Give Me Your Money from Abbey Road for last week's cover. These are more than your average bedroom ukulele youtube covers (not that those aren't great) and you may be surprised to discover Beatles covers actually worth listening to.

So far...
Week 1: Dandelion Wine - While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Week 2: Kathena Bryant - Oh! Darling
Week 3: Peter Buffett - You Never Give Me Your Money

Definitely check out thebeatlescompleteonukulele.blogspot.com each week or add it to your RSS feed reader. Don't miss the liner notes either, which include info on the artists and a mini-essay about each song. You're in a for a real treat on Tuesday when a wonderful cover of Run For Your Life is posted (if you poke around the site, you may just stumble upon it early like I did).

With the whole project set up on Blogspot, I really hope their posts don't mysteriously start disappearing... speaking of which, a few days ago the LA Weekly ran an article about the Google blogger takedowns, an ominous read for bloggers.

Also, I haven't taken my own advice yet, but you should all go see Coraline, the Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas) directed stop-motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman's book since by all accounts it's awesome (as expected).

4 comments:

boyhowdy said...

Great find, Fong. Hurrah for ukulele, the more the better!

(And, oh, I love Dandelion Wine -- their cover of Dixie Chicken is a classic. )

Anonymous said...

Wow, this should provide some fun stuff, assuming they aren't shut down by The Man.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this post.. I had a blast doing the complete beatles on uke. and the concert
for the benefit of mr. buffett. where I also sang songs and performed as Yoko. rock on. Your blog is fun.. xo, kathena bryant aka http;//www.thehippynuts.com
feel free to post some of our stuff..we covered "30 days in the hole"

Anonymous said...

thanks for the cool post... now I have another blog to visit for at least four years! Very cool. q