It was the late 1990s and Mr. Vedder was in Hawaii, decompressing after a tour with his band, Pearl Jam, when one of those modest, four-stringed instruments caught his eye in an out-of-the-way drugstore. He bought it, sat down on a nearby case of beer, and picked out a few melodies. It felt good.
“And then a couple of tourists came by and threw 50 cents in the ukulele case,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, there’s something going on here.’ ”
Mr. Vedder’s new solo album, “Ukulele Songs” (Monkeywrench), will be released May 31. (“Truth in advertising,” he says of the title.) But in the years since his first beer-case serenade, the ukulele’s fortunes have changed. Not long ago it was an endangered species, usually encountered as cheap exotica or a comic prop. Now it permeates the culture to an extent that it hasn’t in more than half a century, turning up in Top 10 pop songs and fashionable indie-rock bands, in television commercials by the hundred and YouTube videos by the thousand. There definitely is something going on here.
The trend, building for a decade and now reaching a saturation point, is being fueled by a mix of Hollywood directors, corporate advertisers, professional musicians looking for a new sound and amateurs who have discovered how easy the uke is to use. Their aims may be completely different — selling deodorant and cars versus thrumming in a Brooklyn bar — but they are united in recognizing that the ukulele offers a folksy, hands-on kind of musical humility that’s hard to find in an age in thrall to “American Idol” and Guitar Hero.
“It symbolizes everything that the grand polished machine of the music industry is not,” said Amanda Palmer, a singer formerly with the punk-cabaret group Dresden Dolls.
A few years ago, as a one-off concert gag, Ms. Palmer strummed a uke as she sang Radiohead’s “Creep,” accompanying herself on a $19 model she had bought the day before. But the performance turned out to be so starkly intense it could not remain a joke. So she began taking a ukulele everywhere, and before long she had recorded a full album: “Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele,” released last year.
That Ms. Palmer absorbed the basics in a day — her usual instrument is the piano — indicates one of the ukulele’s great advantages: it’s so easy to learn that it’s said to be almost impossible to play it badly. Even when slightly off key, it serves as a blank canvas that can accent the character of any voice. And in the right hands, it can strip a song to its skeletal core.
“Nobody picks up the ukulele who is later going to go back and Auto-Tune their vocals,” said Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields, whose 1999 triple album, “69 Love Songs,” featured the ukulele extensively and was a landmark in its revival. “It definitely sounds untrained, and therefore goes with untrained vocal styles.”
Mr. Vedder has a tidy summation of its advantages: “Less strings, more melody.”
The ukulele craze of the 2000s is only the latest in its long history. A descendant of a four-stringed instrument called the machête that Portuguese laborers brought to Hawaii in the 19th century, the ukulele first made a mainland splash in 1915, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. It had waves of mass popularity in the 1920s and the ’50s, but by 1968, when Tiny Tim’s “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” became a novelty hit (No. 17 on the pop charts) — and condemned the instrument to punch line status for years — it was already fading.
Its journey back from oblivion began in the mid-1990s, led by a revival among musicians in Hawaii, and since then it has followed parallel paths in independent and corporate culture. In 1999 a spare and wistful version of “Over the Rainbow” by Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole was used in a commercial for eToys, and sparked a ukulele ad frenzy. The recording has been licensed more than 100 times to sell food, software, paint, bank services, lottery tickets and plenty else, and it shows no sign of slowing down.
It’s not hard to see the attraction. The light, carefree strum that has become the instrument’s sonic stereotype invokes innocence, sincerity and childlike wonder, as well as nostalgia for a pre-rock ’n’ roll era. It doesn’t hurt that the sound also conforms to ingrained notions of Hawaii as a consumer-friendly earthly paradise.
Those connotations can be narrative gold for visual storytellers, and for advertisers they offer instant humanization.
“Everyone is sticking the tinkling sound of ukulele under their commercial,” said Jim Beloff, who wrote “The Ukulele: A Visual History.” “It’s shorthand for lightness of tone. It says, ‘We’re good guys at heart.’ ”
At the same time that Hollywood and corporate America began turning to the ukulele, a grass-roots uke revival gathered steam. Local strumming societies emerged around the country, aided by the Internet. And, following the Magnetic Fields’ lead, the instrument began popping up throughout the indie-rock world: Mirah, Beirut, Dent May, Noah and the Whale, Buke and Gass, Tune-Yards, even a Neutral Milk Hotel tribute band called Neutral Uke Hotel. From there it spread to the mainstream.
The ukulele is all over Train’s 2009 song “Hey, Soul Sister,” for example, which reached No. 3, won a Grammy Award and was featured on “Glee.” (And let’s not forget the Beatles factor: Paul McCartney paid tribute to the ukulele-loving George Harrison at the 2002 “Concert for George”; four years later Jake Shimabukuro’s virtuoso “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” became a YouTube hit.)
As Ms. Palmer sees it, the ukulele is the zeitgeist instrument for the D.I.Y. age. “This is the age of the democratization of music,” she says. “Anyone can be a musician. And in a recession, when you have a $20 instrument and there’s a big musical renaissance, anyone will want to join in.”
Sales of the instrument, meanwhile, have surged. Sammy Ash, chief operating officer of the Sam Ash music stores, said he sold more ukuleles last December than in the entire previous decade, along with lots of accessories. “We sell a Metallica ukulele book,” Mr. Ash said, “and we sell a lot of them.”
Perhaps some of those Metallica uke skills will be on display at the New York Uke Fest from May 5 to 7, with concerts and workshops including slide guitar technique and lei making (nyukefest.com).
For most of its history the ukulele has tended to be defined by its limitations: it lacks the resonance of the guitar, the bark and twang of the banjo, and one result is a narrow range of performance styles. In some ways that’s the ukulele’s strength, a simple, effective strum that anyone can learn. But — aside from the dazzling performances of masters like Mr. Shimabukuro — is that all there is?
Mr. Vedder’s album is halfway between the standard uke style and something more idiosyncratic. Respecting one of the instrument’s unwritten rules, he plays antique songs like “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and “Tonight You Belong to Me” (you may remember Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters singing that one in “The Jerk”). And he exploits the sentimentality of the instrument for all it’s worth, singing lines like “For every wish upon a star that goes unanswered in the dark/There is a dream I’ve dreamt about you.” But on songs like “Can’t Keep,” he seems to be trying to cram an angst-y Pearl Jam song through the tiny instrument, attacking the strings.
Merrill Garbus of the band Tune-Yards, whose second album, “Whokill” (4AD), is scheduled to be released Tuesday, is more experimental. Ms. Garbus creates loops of sound using drums, ukulele and her own voice, weaving the elements together over reggae beats and African-influenced vocal melodies.
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t hear the ukulele on a first listen. Through various electronic manipulations she has made it sound like a synthesizer, or a distorted electric guitar, or simply short blasts of noise. But listen carefully and you’ll hear the tell-tale plink-plink of a ukulele.
“I definitely made it my goal to make the ukulele sound not like the ukulele,” Ms. Garbus said. “I’ve been amplifying the ukulele through a pick-up and then overdriving it in a really great tube amp, so the texture became not the stereotypical strum of the ukulele. It has these gnarly edges to it.”
Or, as Mr. Vedder explained: “My inspiration was to wrestle with the thing, to give it something different from the way it’s been played before. Can I make this happy little instrument as depressed as I am?”
nytimes.com