JULIA NUNES' UNLIKELY FAME, UNLIKELY INSTRUMENT
UKULELE-STRUMMING SINGER MAKES THE DOWNCAST SOUND UPBEAT

Julia Nunes is famous, sort of. She still doesn't believe it, either.

"It still kind of baffles me when I come to play a show and there are people there," says Nunes.

Her YouTube channel, jaaaaaaa, has more than 142,000 subscribers, and many of her videos have more than 1 million views. She's opened for Ben Folds and gotten a shout-out from Molly Ringwald(?!). Nunes can rock the house with a ukulele and a beat box.

And other questions besides "What the heck?" come to mind about the college junior majoring in music who has surfed YouTube to unlikely fame with the unlikeliest of instruments.

Isn't this a gimmick? No.

Are these real songs? Yes.

Isn't she famous for oddball cover songs? Sort of.

The ukulele is a joke instrument, right? Not any longer, and not in the hands of Nunes.

One of her songs, "Odd," is about her inability to love. Nunes sings: "I am cold, unfeeling and odd/And you should thank God/That we're on other sides of the state." It's impossible for the ukulele not to sound bright and jaunty. A radio disc jockey said this song was "the sound of sunshine." Ha! It's all part of Nunes' ukulele subversion, because she loves "how happy I could make ironic songs sound on it."

"I guess I don't mind being associated with the ukulele," Nunes says. "It's a certain type of girl that plays the ukulele, because it's kind of cool right now."

And how.

"In the last year at the Old Town School, we have more than doubled the amount of ukulele classes that we offer," says Sarah Dandelles, a program manager at the North Side institution. "And that's just for adults, not kids. We had ukulele as one of the key instruments in our summer camp last year, and it went gangbusters.

"They're small, they're cheap, they're very cute and it's a beautiful sound."

All of which made a 13-year-old Nunes, who was already writing songs, start plucking away on her grandfather's ukulele. Later, when heading off to camp, she couldn't take a guitar and settled on a ukulele because it was small and fit in her backpack.

"I've been writing songs since I was like 13. … I decided to go to open mics, this 13-year-old girl singing about heartbreak that I haven't actually experienced.

"The covers came along because they were fun. … Doing covers is fun, but it's not a soul-baring process. Where the new songs are blatantly, intensely me, speaking to everyone, and also to very specific people, who know exactly who they are. That can be a little embarrassing sometimes."

Today, talking via telephone to Nunes, she sounds exactly like the kind of smart, kind of goofy, kind of fun, extremely creative person who would do precisely what she's doing. You hope she doesn't lose that sense of awe attendant to all this. She doesn't want to be signed and just wants to make a living making music.

And you start having more questions, like where is this all going, and Nunes has no idea. She's toured England (they loved her), and she's big in Brazil (top fan mail source). Nunes just hits you that way as she stares straight into the camera, plucking away on that uke, obliterating the gap between performer and fan. Her devotees reach out with e-mails, Twitter pokes, Facebook messages and YouTube notes. But it's the touching ones that she remembers most.

"One guy was in the Army, and he was really lonely and didn't know the guys that he was with," says Nunes. "He was explaining how he'd joined the Army wanting to get a family … and he just wasn't one of the guys.

"On the base, they had Internet, really slow, and he found one of my videos. It took him two hours to download it, and it made him so happy. Then another guy came over, and they replayed it, then another guy. And they started talking, and he made two best friends over watching and waiting for my videos to load. … I just have no idea how to respond to that.

Julia Nunes
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Schubas,
3159 N. Southport Ave.
Price: $15; 773-525-2508,
schubas.com

 

Kevin Williams - Chicago Tribune, Chicago IL (Jan 2010)

 

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