I was learning songs in like two seconds. “So, I was like, ‘Ugh, this will be a pain in the ass!’ But when I started, I just got addicted. It was cool because I knew all the guitar chords but I was, like, ‘Oh shit, these are all different fingerings for ukulele.’ You could see the fingering of the chords. “It was kind of interactive it showed you all these Beatles songs with the chords simply. It was just a Beatles website with, like, 100 songs. When I first got it, I was on this thing called, ‘’.
“When I first got it, I wasn’t in a band anymore. But I remember bringing a ukulele because it was fun. And then you’d have people who were insane guitar players, so they’d play whatever the fuck it was. But then when you were going to writing sessions, you wouldn’t know who would be there. “When I was writing with my little band, we sat down with guitars.
There’s something about bringing a ukulele to a writing session over bringing a guitar where, you know, if you bring a guitar to a writing session, especially the way writing has been and was in 2009, there’s a lot of track shit, a lot of electronic shit, people using computers.
#Rihanna love on the brain ukulele portable
“I just remember I thought it was fun and portable and kind of off-the-cuff. When my artist career kind of got put on the back burner, I remember I’d always wanted to play the ukulele. But that was the biggest hassle for that and just feeling insecure about my playing always. Because when your brain is split and you try to join it again, it’s very difficult. “Yeah, I’m jealous of people that do it together and it’s just seamless – they don’t even think about it. And then it was slow going for me because it was very hard to join my being able to sing and play.
“So, it was kind of like a beatdown all the time, you know? Not to blame anybody else but myself, but I was discouraged from getting a guitar. Then I was in a band where the guitar player was threatened by me getting better at guitar. So, I couldn’t get a guitar until I was, you know, probably late teenage years. So, this motherfucker told me I wasn’t going to play guitar. “In my life, I stick with things from my physical exercise to my playing to my singing. He wasn’t a guy that stuck with something. My father said, ‘You’re not going to play it.’ I was like, ‘Oh I’m not going to play it?!’ My father, I learned, was not one of those people who really – he wasn’t artistic. “I always wanted to play guitar when I was a kid and my parents were like, ‘Ah, you’re not going to play it.’ I don’t know why.