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Daniel Ward - El Ukulele

As you'll see in our interview, Daniel plays a few different genres, but with a flamenco style being a particular speciality.

It's a mixture of covers and originals. The covers are originally done, though. "Norwegian Wood" is a delicate performance, symple and rythmic with a gentle bass accompaniment. "Route 66" is unrecognisable to start with, coming across as a deep latin rhythm, and the melody of the original deep in the tune. Slightly cheesy (and showing some of Daniel's humour), is "Silly Love Songs" with its chorus of "I Love Uke". Cheesy, but an earworm!

"Aire For The Cat Rancher" - hear the story about this on the video - is a short rendition, the feeling of the song comes across. Next is "Lucila" - distinctly upbeat and likely one you will have heard if you've seen him live, he gets the audience singing along to this one.

A middle eastern atmosphere comes across with "Istanbul", for the comedy version you'll have to seek out his partner - Heidi Swedberg who has a brilliant comic version of the well know song - but this is a great instrumental.

Daniel's background as an audio engineer comes across, the recording and production is excellent throughout, none of this "recorded in my back room" stuff, it's recorded in a proper studio with great care. Also, Daniel plays more notes in a single track on this album than we will probably play in a lifetime! It's also fair to say that this will be an album that you won't be embarassed to play when your non-ukulele friends come to visit. It's just good music, not a ukulele thrash.

If you buy the CD, it's also beatifully illustrated and packaged, in a nicely illustrated tri-fold booklet with proper CD tray.

Buy the album here - but you can win one, we have one copy to give away, visit this post on facebook.

11 tracks, 39 minutes.

1. Nima
2. Norwegian Wood
3. Black Orpheus
4. Darling
5. Route 66
6. Aire For The Cat Rancher
7. Lucila
8. Istanbul
9. Beatrice
10. Silly Love Songs (I Love Uke)
11. Aloha Oe

Review - Simon Taylor, 15th July 2016


We misheard "Aire For The Cat Rancher" originally and were slightly worried it was "Cat Wrencher" Thankfully, we were wrong.