Gift That Came Here is an instrumental EP of ukulele driven experimental post-rock songs.

I got this uke in the winter of 2017 to help with teaching a Chinese ESL student. He was preparing for a summer abroad at Berklee and needed to learn the basics of music theory in English. In my spare time at work though, the uke was there to accompany me. I messed around with it and recorded a bunch of little things. These demos were the seeds from which these songs grew.

However, the concept of this EP wasn't realized until I got bored one afternoon and decided to wiki the ukulele. I read about Madeiran workers in Hawaii developing a uke in 1879. And I stumbled upon a sweet quote taken from the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani. She was a writer, a musician, as well as the last sovereign monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and consequentially imprisoned when the kingdom had fallen. She wrote:

"To compose was as natural to me as to breathe; and this gift of nature, never having been suffered to fall into disuse, remains a source of the greatest consolation to this day.[…] Hours of which it is not yet in place to speak, which I might have found long and lonely, passed quickly and cheerfully by, occupied and soothed by the expression of my thoughts in music."

I really related to that, and I hope Gift That Came Here might help you on a long and lonely day too. Perhaps you can even vicariously experience what it was like to compose it. I mean, you could do a lot worse with your time.

This EP will be used to raise money for the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation. All of the funds raised will be donated directly. My hope is that by playing the ukulele, a gift immigrants brought to Hawaii, it will in-turn help bring more gifts to some less fortunate children this winter.

www.toysfortots.org