Palmer absorbed the basics in a day - her usual instrument is the piano - indicates one of the ukulele’s great advantages: it’s so easy to learn that it’s said to be almost impossible to play it badly. So she began taking a ukulele everywhere, and before long she had recorded a full album: “Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele,” released last year. But the performance turned out to be so starkly intense it could not remain a joke.

Palmer strummed a uke as she sang Radiohead’s “Creep,” accompanying herself on a $19 model she had bought the day before. “It symbolizes everything that the grand polished machine of the music industry is not,” said Amanda Palmer, a singer formerly with the punk-cabaret group Dresden Dolls.Ī few years ago, as a one-off concert gag, Ms. There definitely is something going on here. Now it permeates the culture to an extent that it hasn’t in more than half a century, turning up in Top 10 pop songs and fashionable indie-rock bands, in television commercials by the hundred and YouTube videos by the thousand. Not long ago it was an endangered species, usually encountered as cheap exotica or a comic prop. (“Truth in advertising,” he says of the title.) But in the years since his first beer-case serenade, the ukulele’s fortunes have changed. Vedder’s new solo album, “Ukulele Songs” (Monkeywrench), will be released May 31. “And I thought, ‘Wow, there’s something going on here.’ ” “And then a couple of tourists came by and threw 50 cents in the ukulele case,” he said. He bought it, sat down on a nearby case of beer, and picked out a few melodies.

Vedder was in Hawaii, decompressing after a tour with his band, Pearl Jam, when one of those modest, four-stringed instruments caught his eye in an out-of-the-way drugstore. LIKE everybody else, Eddie Vedder was shocked by what the ukulele could do.

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