Christmas Wrapping

Thanks to my wife Lisa for the shakerlele accompaniment. Thanks to Kevin Wackov for producing the bass line. I saw the Waitresses at SF Great American Music Hall sometime in the early 80s. This song is almost more than I can chew; I can’t quite spit out all those lyrics cleanly at 116 BPM. It gets worse as I approach the end of the song. My arrangement reduces the lines of the chorus for that reason. The adjusted arrangement may also spare folks tired of hearing the song. A Youtube comment mentioned that retail workers have involuntarily memorized it. I used the Risa electric with some reverb; the cut-away allows me to grab an A chord at 12-11-10-10. Playing along with the song, as I charted it, I kept gaining beats at several points. In desperation, I downloaded the sheet music and discovered 3/4 and 2/4 time signature shifts (see chart page 3 notes for locations). My arrangement keeps everything at 4/4 because I could not coerce the GarageBand bass line to deal with the 3/4 shift. My Blackbird Farallon acoustic ukulele plays the recorded inter-verse riff. For convenience, I had to abandon my usual mixer setup and mic the bass and ukulele amplifiers. The video is from the South Bay Acoustic Music jam. I brought the song to Ukulele Rebellion the following night, where the batteries gave out on the bass amp during the last verse, and I had to improvise from there.