Anatomy of a Ukuleles For Peace Recording Session:

Today I've posted an mp3 of the kids doing "All Together Now", and I've intentionally posted the unedited, untrimmed file so that you can get a clearer idea of what these recording sessions are like. This particular song was from the session last night, with 15 UFP kids. But first, a few things you need to know before you listen...

1) The whacking sound you can hear right at the beginning is Paul hitting a wooden cabinet with a newspaper - the cabinet is home to a very noisy woodworm (you can actually hear the woodworm making little clicking sounds right after Paul says "shhhhh"), and the woodworm was apparently getting excited by all the music. And let me assure you that Paul is referring to the woodworm, not the kids, when he says "be quiet or I'll kill you!"

2) At several points in this take you can hear what happens when the chords C, F and G7 are played simultaneously on fifteen ukuleles. Not entirely unpleasant, but not quite "all together now" - not yet, anyway!

3) "Balagan" is a word that has been adopted into Hebrew from Yiddish, Polish and Russian (though some etymologists claim it has roots in Turkish, Old Persian and Old Indo-European). Balagan in the sense it's used in Israel today means "mess" or "chaos". So when you hear Paul say "that's what I call a good balagan" at the end of the take, that's what he means.