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Ukulele folk hip-hop - how did that happen?

Well, I found the ukulele in a garbage can when I was in high school and carried it everywhere. The hip-hop? That came after college, one rough summer in Hartford, CT. I was working 80 hours a week, organizing with students for clean air and power. It was the kind of thing where you talk and talk all day long about democracy and justice and health and change. You take it door-to-door and people keep slamming them in your face but you just keep talking, keep believing. On top of this, I'd just been through a couple kamikaze attempts at true love that left me raw and hungry. I turned to music, but none of my favorites, not the Beatles, not Miles Davis, not Bob Dylan were up to the task of getting me through. I needed something that just rocked. Something I could lean into, wail out at the top of my lungs; something to pour full of the gritty, buzzing exhaustion and hope of those days. My ukulele was with me, serving as my best friend, bodyguard and security blanket. But I couldn't plug it in or strum very loud. It’s hard to be hard-hitting with a small instrument most people think of as a kids toy. So rapping was really the only choice.

I started listening to hip hop radio, even the commercial crap, I started stuffing my brain with as much outkast, biggie, common, the roots, erykah badu, jay-z and lauryn hill I could get my ears on. On saturday mornings I would wake up with words & rhymes sprouting in my head and walk out with my uke through the streets, flowing by the sleeping houses. Late at night, I tested my new songs with my team over trays of greasy pizza. I've been writing songs and poems and playing music my whole life, but these songs were a totally new experience. People kept thanking me, telling me I had hit something, even telling others. Maybe I was delirious from lack of sleep, but I felt like people needed these songs - songs that are unabashedly political but also intimate, funky music to move to, laugh to, get dumped and fall in love to, music that got to the heart of what was happening to us.

A few years, a few cities and a farm later, I’m devoted to this sound. I want to build it, develop it, and get it to more of the folks who could use it. I’m now living in NYC, not sleeping much. I can’t stop writing rhymes and songs, I can’t stop playing and performing. I’ve recorded a couple albums, played with a roving cast of incredible musicians (check ‘band members’ box), who’ve lent their style and skill to my tunes, and joined forces for some unforgettable shows and recordings where, musically, it all, so to speak, came together.

There’s 3 feelings I get from music I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of – that I’m not sure I could live without. The first, and maybe the most addicting, is the thrill of writing a song, finding a new hook, or rhyme, or beat, when it just feels right, you know it’s going to rock, and immediately you can’t remember what life was like without it, because it suddenly puts everything in perspective, makes it all understandable, and you could just play the chorus all night in a room by yourself until your voice runs out or you just collapse from exhaustion or thirst or break a string. The second is the feeling of playing a song for the first time with someone else, another player, when all of a sudden they start playing the parts you could hear in your head but couldn’t play by yourself, the bass drum hits or the harmony or the bass line or horn part, and the song comes out into the air and the groove is just what you imagined and it pops into existence for the first time, and you think, ‘yeah, that’s it.’ The last feeling, and maybe the best, is when you play a song for someone else, maybe they’ve never heard it before and you can see the mixture of surprise and relief in their eyes, like it just hit the spot, because people don’t expect good music, they just need it… or maybe it’s someone who really knows your tunes, and they’ve been waiting all night or all week for you to play a particular song, and you can see them mouthing the words along with you, and you know that feeling, because it’s the feeling you always have listening to music you love, and you realize you’ve just given them that feeling, and for a moment, in just this one small way, you feel like you’re giving back.