The Austin Ukulele Society’s August meeting was filled with the wonderful energy that can only be found when 160+ ukulele enthusiasts get together for an evening of community music! ❤

We’ve been rockin’ and groovin’ to upbeat tunes over the past few months, so it was time to turn our attention to another song style we love: ballads. We learned to strum, sing, and harmonize Christina Perri”s “A Thousand Years.” This 2011 hit was written for the very popular romantasy film “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1,” and continues to be loved across the world. We had a blast playing this lovely song together!

We started the evening with local ukulele news, including a ‘save the date’ for Lil Rev and Rocking Ray’s September 25th workshop and concert. Then we enjoyed warming up our voices and fingers with Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.”  

Bob shared an overview of his arrangement of “A Thousand Years” and gave a great performance of it to help us get ready to learn it. We practiced all of the components of the song, including the strum style, tab options, vocal harmonizing options, and getting comfortable with the tempo, with Bob’s excellent teaching and useful exercises. After playing it through a couple of times, we were ready for a little break from our efforts.

Thankfully, we had three terrific performances during the open mic portion of the evening: Jess Holloway played a great rock song, The John Davenport and Leta performed a lovely duet of a Jacob Borshard song, and Sho Humphries blew the roof off (and got a standing ovation for it) with one of his original compositions. Thanks for sharing your talent with us!

Next, we got back to work on “A Thousand Years” and we sounded better and better with each run through, so we recorded ourselves and hope you’ll play along with us from home.  It will be coming soon to our YouTube Channel! 

To play along, you can download the lyrics, chords, and tab for Bob’s arrangement of “A Thousand Years” or download a copy of the presentation and instruction guide (what we project on the screen for all to follow along, including exercises and drills).

As always, we’re immensely grateful to Aaron for his accompaniment on U-bass and to Bob, Jen, Lyda, Jana, Lori, Barry, and all the fabulous AUS volunteers, for all their hard work.

We look forward to seeing you at our September 11th monthly meeting at St. John’s United Methodist Church! Keep on strumming until then!  🙂

For more downloadable music, visit our Ukulele Music Library. For more Austin Ukulele Society videos, check out our YouTube Channel.

We appreciate your support and interest. If you’d like to make a donation to the Austin Ukulele Society (a 501(c)(3) organization), visit our Square Donation site. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please fill out our this short sign-up form. For any other inquiries, please contact us or shoot us an email if you have previous correspondence with us.

Ukulele Society T-shirts!
We’re very excited about our 2025 Austin Ukulele Society t-shirt, “Circle of Stars,” designed by Lyda Guz! Each of the 15 stars stands for an action-packed year we’ve been making music together. As always, the shirts are silk-screened right here in Austin at a fantastic locally-owned print shop.

Our new “Circle of Stars” design, “AUS Grackle,” “Classic Ukulele,” “Ukulele Around the World,” “10th Anniversary,” Mermaid, Cowboy,” “Austin Lasso” and other shirts are $25. We also have vinyl decals with the AUS logo for $1 each. We can accept cash or a check made out to Austin Ukulele Society; you can also make payment via Venmo or PayPal. Please drop us a line if you’d like to purchase a shirt (or two or three). 🙂 At this time, we can only ship orders within the U.S.