Why the One-Man Ukulele Band Survived on Zombie Romance by BlackSheepLad

Phil Mellen Plays Every Part of a Lockdown Love Song, From Baritone to Bass Ukulele

The credits for Zombie Romance by BlackSheepLad fit on one line, and only one name appears on it. Phil Mellen plays the guitar, the baritone ukulele, the bass ukulele and the keyboards, and he sings it too. The song came out of his lockdown, and one pair of hands built the whole arrangement.

BlackSheepLad’s Zombie Romance sits in the playlist below, and the BlackSheepLad artist profile keeps the rest of his coverage in one place. The song reached MusicRoots.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Play it first, then read on for how one player built it.

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Baritone and Bass Ukuleles Give BlackSheepLad a Low End on Zombie Romance Without a Band

Most people picture the ukulele as a small, bright instrument. Zombie Romance uses two of its deeper relatives instead. The baritone ukulele takes the tuning of a guitar’s top four strings, so it carries chords with more weight than a soprano. The bass ukulele, by contrast, is a short-scale bass with a bass guitar’s tuning, and it gives the song a soft, rounded bottom end.

That pairing is the core of the arrangement. Between them, the two instruments cover the middle and the low end that a band would normally split between a rhythm guitar and a bass player. Guitar and keyboards then fill in around them, and the voice sits on top. The song also moves in waltz time, three beats to the bar, so each part has room to breathe between the strong first beats.

Every Part of the Lockdown Recording of Zombie Romance Comes From One Player

The writing is light on its feet. The lyric sets up a hypothetical pandemic in which millions of people become the undead, and the narrator promises that love will hold even if the worst symptoms arrive. On his Bandcamp page, Mellen sums it up as a song about being in love with one of the undead. His EPK puts the origin more plainly still: too many zombie films watched during lockdown.

Mellen’s route to the record explains the method. He sang and played in bands through his teens, twenties and thirties, and then he spent 25 years working in education. In March 2020 he caught coronavirus and lived with the after-effects for a long time. The enforced inactivity that followed brought a burst of songwriting and, in time, a deal with the North West label Wobbly Music.

A record made that way grows in layers, one part at a time. Every instrument has to leave space for the next, because no other player is in the room to push back. On Zombie Romance, that discipline shows. The ukuleles keep to their own registers, the keyboards add colour rather than weight, and the vocal stays clear of the busy frequencies below it.

Prefab Sprout, Ben Folds and Doves Show the One-Person Arrangement Has a Long Line

The one-person arrangement has a long history in British and American songwriting. Prefab Sprout offer a clear example in Crimson/Red from 2013, on which Paddy McAloon wrote, sang and played every note. Similarly, Ben Folds played most of the instruments on Rockin’ the Suburbs in 2001.

Both names appear on Mellen’s own list of influences. So does Doves, the band that formed in Wilmslow, the Cheshire town where Mellen is based. That makes Zombie Romance part of a local line as well as a technical one.

MusicRoots.News’s curator team: “The bass ukulele is the quiet hero of Zombie Romance. It gives a one-man recording the low-end warmth of a band, and that is what lets a joke about the undead land as a real love song.”

Where to Hear Zombie Romance Live and Follow BlackSheepLad on Every Platform

The song first reached streaming services in late 2020, and it arrived as a promoted single in February 2021. Fresh On The Net then picked it for their Eclectic Picks in March 2022, and the Enter The Shell podcast featured it in What The Music?! Volume 18. It has also travelled beyond the studio. In 2022 Mellen performed it for the Narrowboat Sessions, and that live version shows how the arrangement holds up in a stripped-back setting.

This one is for listeners who like folk pop with a wry streak and an arrangement worth unpicking. Put it on headphones and follow the bass ukulele under the vocal. Then listen again for how the keyboards slip in around it. The single is also on Apple Music.

Follow BlackSheepLad across platforms: Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X and the official website.

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