All My Umbrellas

“All My Umbrellas” is the first song I wrote on ukulele. I bought my first uke, a cheap soprano, at a guitar shop in Austin, Texas, while on a cross-country road trip in December of 2003. I’d picked up and messed around with ukes a few times before, but I didn’t know any chords. I think what especially called to me about this particular uke was that it said Gremlin on the headstock (a ukulele manufacturer in the UK). I bought my Gremlin on my birthday, December 20th.

I had Jane, my ‘62 Guild hollowbody electric (pictured below at The Springwater, Nashville, TN), with me on this trip, but since I was staying at hostels and sleeping on peoples’ floors, etc. I didn’t have many opportunities to plug Jane in, except at gigs (I’d lined up gigs in Missoula, MT, Olympia, WA, and Nashville, TN). I wanted something portable to strum in between, something I didn’t have to get out of the back seat and bust out of a hard-case every time I wanted to play.

Can I blame the Gremlin for the fact that, when I checked out of the Austin Youth Hostel, I left my beloved Jane in a locked closet there, and didn’t realize this till I’d arrived on the outskirts of Houston, about four hours away? I can still feel that moment of visceral shock when I reached into the backseat in a sudden panic and realized that Jane wasn’t there. Oh, the horror, the horror, the horror. And, oh, the depths of self-loathing one sinks to at an awful moment like that. I turned around and drove another four hours back to get Jane, then turned back around and drove about another six hours to reach the hostel in Lafayette, LA, that I’d reserved a bunk at. About fourteen hours of almost non-stop driving = lots and lots of time for muttered expletives and self-flagellation.

Gremlin came with a tiny booklet that had major uke chords listed in it that helped me on my way. A few stops later (Nashville, Knoxville) I made it to my friend Jess’s house in Carolina Beach, NC, where I stayed for a week. I spent a lot of time roaming the beach with my Gremlin. This is where I wrote “All My Umbrellas,” with a mix of chords I learned from the booklet (and one chord that I still can’t identify, fifteen years later). I remember part of another song I wrote then, too, about running away from home, but the chords to that one are buried in the sand.

This trip was largely precipitated by a Biblical plague that had recently struck me. My basement apartment in Northampton had flooded due to a massive rainstorm that had backed up the city’s drains. The flooding originated from the toilets in the basement apartments overflowing. It was such a bad flood that both of the basement apartments in that sketchy building on the corner of School and South Streets were condemned. I’d lived in that dank but homey diver for eight years. In the days following the flood, I ended up throwing out tons of things I’d accumulated in those years, some due to water damage, some just so I could get the hell out of there. I moved the rest into my friend Cory’s spare bedroom in Leverett. Then I took a semester off of my teaching job (a “sabbatical”--which was actually four months of leave without pay), and planned a road trip around the perimeter of the continental states.

Anyhow, I give so much back story for this tiny little song because “All My Umbrellas” was very much informed by my mindset following the flood and during my subsequent road trip. I’d had to “unclutter” myself of so many big bulky things, and I was considering the flood some kind of sign that maybe it was time to also cut ties and leave western MA. I thought of my road trip as a chance to scout out new locations for a fresh start. (Ultimately I just ended up leaving Hampshire County for greener pastures and less gentrification up the road in Greenfield.)

“Umbrellas” asked me to look at how much I belonged to my belongings. It was an invitation to strip away all the cellulite and get down to the bare bones of what I need, to expose myself to elements, even if it means getting “soaked to the bone.” It was also the beginning of my love for simpler, smaller songs played on a simpler, smaller instrument.