What do you get when you give a sixth-generation musician and aspiring songwriter a ukulele? You’re expecting fey songs or something a little bedroom-based, right? No, no, no…that’s not Charissa Hoffman at all. She explains that “I always saw myself as a writer – I was a really bookish kid and I loved music, so I took a songwriting class. I wrote a song, but I didn’t play any instruments. It was like a corny 11-year-old song, but it was such an emotional release for me. I’d never experienced anything that cathartic before. I was really chasing that when I decided I wanted to pick up an instrument. And I chose ukulele, not only because I didn’t think I could screw it up. It was also because I was trying to feel more of that catharsis.” That desire to not mess up on the uke was fulfilled as Charissa Hoffman would go on to be the first ukulele principal to be accepted at Berklee College of Music. It was there that she met other advanced acoustic players, which links to her new debut album Horizons, which features the likes of Béla Fleck, Abigail Washburn, Chris Eldridge, and Nina de Vitry. Hoffman says of Fleck, “He’s such a natural collaborator. He’s so good at serving the music and bringing his voice to it, but in a way where it’s making the song more powerful overall.” She doesn’t say, so we will, that you have to be kind of good, and not just in a repetitive way but in a forging new paths way, to get Béla Fleck to play with you. So, yeah, Charissa Hoffman is pretty darn good at what she does.
Speaking of the album, Hoffman adds: “When I was a young teen, I was very curious, listening to Pandora and buying CDs from secondhand stores, stuff like the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and Aoife O’Donovan and Gillian Welch; singer-songwriters touching on topics that I hadn’t heard before. I think a lot of folks go through this phase of figuring out who they are, apart from their parents, by listening to music. If someone hears this record and it resonates with them in the same way that those records resonated with me, then it’s a success. I’ll be very happy.”
And that, folks, is today’s message to the world: try to not be your parents’ record collection (although you can “borrow” their Kinks album).
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