Our February meeting was one for the books, with ~175 ukulele enthusiasts ready to learn to sing and strum our first-ever Taylor Swift song! Swift’s a songwriter known for penning many fantastic songs about romantic relationships and heartbreak, and we knew she’d be a great choice for our Valentine’s-week meeting. 
We learned to strum, pick, and sing “You Belong With Me.” This 2008 mega-hit is considered one of Swift’s signature songs, and we had a blast singing and strumming along to its infectious tune with great lyrics.
Bob kicked off the meeting with introductions and a quick review of the agenda. We also played through our warm-up song – Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.”
Bob (with Aaron on bass) performed his arrangement of “You Belong With Me,” much to our listening pleasure, and to help us get familiar with what we’d be learning. We dove into helpful exercises to learn the strum style, the chord progressions, the harmonizing options, and the picking parts. When we put the song together, we sounded fantastic!
We took a break and delighted in three excellent open mic performances. The lovely trio of Kelly, Kim and Becky covered “Blue Skies,” Paul did a great rendition of “Makin’ Love Ukulele Style,” and Roy and Theresa performed a great cover of the classic John Prine/Iris DeMent duet “In Spite of Ourselves.” We’re thankful, always, to our open mic participants – and we hope to see you at the Ukulele Open Mic on Saturday, February 21st!!
We got back to practicing “You Belong With Me” and recorded ourselves – we hope you enjoy our video and playing 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 “You Belong With Me” or download a copy of the presentation and instruction guide (what we project on the screens for all to follow along, including exercises and drills).
As always, we’re immensely grateful to Aaron for his accompaniment on U-bass and all the fabulous AUS volunteers for all their hard work.
Take care and be well. We look forward to seeing you all at our March 12th 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 and Merch!
We’re very excited about our 2026 Austin Ukulele Society t-shirt, “Ukin’ Armadillo,” designed by Lyda Guz. This cool design features a rockin’ and rollin’ armadillo happily strumming his favorite ukulele decorated with 16 stars to celebrates the Austin Ukulele Society’s 16th year of making music together. As always, the shirts are silk-screened right here in Austin at a fantastic locally-owned print shop.
Our new “Ukin’ Armadillo” design, “Circle of Stars,” “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.
Austin Ukulele Society (AUS) 