I play the ukulele. I have a great group of friends, and we do things like have battles of the bands - me sometimes on ukulele, but mostly on drums.
How do I relax? This might sound slightly ridiculous but I play the ukulele for at least an hour a day and I find something really blissful about it.
I had a $1.50 from playing the ukulele after owning it seven minutes. I thought, "Hmmm, this has some possibilities."
The Bolsheviks started not just on the killing of private property; they were trying to abolish money itself.
There's something about guitars, they're just so big, you know what I mean? You're just like, 'Ugh!' It just seems so overwhelming. And the ukulele is, like, the opposite of overwhelming.
I had simply been inspired by Arthur Godfrey (40's) and Ukulele Ike and Cliff Edwards (20's). In there day, they were huge in this country. I bought Godfrey's book "You Too Can Learn To Play Ukulele" and taught myself. It's a very romantic instrument. You can take it on a canoe.
I'm having the same problems today that I had when I first started, saying that outrageous adult animation works.
When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.
When I started, there weren't that many kids doing it in the city, but the in the wave after me there were a lot of them and they actually never spoke to each other.
Growing up, the ukulele was always a respected instrument. It's a big part of our culture. It wasn't until I started traveling outside of Hawaii that I realized people didn't really consider the ukulele to be a real instrument.
Bill Gates recently picked up the ukulele. And Warren Buffett is a huge ukulele fan. I even got to strum a few chords with Francis Ford Coppola. It blows my mind that these people, who have everything in the world they could want, have picked up the ukulele and found a little bit of joy.
I started out playing ukulele when I was 5 or 6 years old.
Most of the reason I work out now is not for the external - it's for how I feel. I find working out gives me more energy. I started eight days after he was born.
Laughter brings out the child in all of us.
My mind started wandering. I started playing carefully, instead of playing the way that had gotten me to that point. I had to force myself to keep driving the ball.
I've recently started composting in my apartment, which is quite an adventure.
When I got back into the film business after college, I started out as a production assistant.
I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.
Well, it was kind of accidental that Jim started playing with us, although it wasn't sudden... we hadn't really looked around to think who could be a fifth member.
It was hard to figure out what were the good causes, the bad causes, even the good politics and the bad politics. So we started taking requests and figuring it out.
I grew up in a musical family; the majority of my growing up was done in Hawaii. It's what we do. You sing, you dance, you play ukulele and you drink.
I prepared five songs, I sang them, and he hired me. I started working about a month later at the piano bar.
As I try to get around with a guitar, a banjo and a suitcase of high heels and dresses, I treasure that little ukulele.
I was starting to play the ukulele at the same time I was having all these conversations with [the late Ramones guitarist] Johnny Ramone, these intense tutorials staying up late and listening to the music he grew up on, and picking up what's a great song and what makes a great song. He was all about lists and dissecting songs, like what's a better song by Cheap Trick: "No Surrender" or "Dream Police"? Sometimes you'd be surprised by the answer. It was an interesting dichotomy between hanging out with the godfather of punk rock and starting to play the ukulele. They came together.
When I was five. That's when I started to love film.
