Tune-Yards: The Idea That No One Was Listening
Following a detour into the film-scoring world, Tune-Yards swing back with another set of experimental, socially conscious global rhythms
“For me, there’s always a question of ‘Is this more healing than harmful—this project?’” Merrill Garbus says of Tune-Yards, her art-pop duo with partner and longtime collaborator Nate Brenner. “Because of the roots of Tune[1]Yards—‘white woman who finds meaning and so much life energy in music from the African Diaspora’—there’s always a question for me of ‘Is this working? Is this the right thing to continue it?’” Garbus has examined similar themes of injustice—in terms of race, gender and America itself—since Tune-Yards’s 2009 debut, Bird-Brains, her words pogoing off a set of technicolor, rhythmically dense grooves that blend folk, funk, soul and Afrobeat. She’s posed questions about privilege throughout her catalog, including on 2011’s Whokill—a critical and commercial breakthrough that notably topped The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll. But the topic appeared most nakedly on Tune-Yards’ fourth LP, 2018’s I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life.
Garbus has always made a point to explore complex, multifaceted problems—but while promoting Private Life on tour, she started to feel uncomfortable even participating in the very structures that elevated her voice to begin with. More than ever, she felt unsure whether or not Tune-Yards still needed to exist.
“I feel like that after every single record,” she admits. “I think a lot of musicians go through that mindset of ‘I don’t know how to do this again.’ I guess I always come back to the same answer—that it feels more useful for me to explore whiteness in music than it does to be yet another person talking out of their ass. [Laughs.] There’s a phrase I’m learning from some anti-racist training called ‘complexity tolerance’—there is this paradox in music. The music says one thing while the lyric says another. There’s a lot of three- and four-dimensionality that music can give us while we’re dealing with the bigger questions in life.”
That introspection ultimately birthed Tune-Yards’ latest LP, sketchy, building on the cultural relevance of Private Life by expanding things further outward. At various points, Garbus reflects on whiteness and gentrification, as well as her still-urgent thirst for social justice in a society teeming with racism. She also dives into the betrayal of earlier generations and questions starting a family in such a fractured world.
“Part of what I’m learning about, in terms of white accountability, is the imagination exercise of allowing yourself to go, ‘What might I need to sacrifice here? Where am I causing harm?’” she says. “I want to be able to at least entertain the possibility of seeing what real, true repair and atonement look like.”
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When Tune-Yards started work on sketchy in 2019, Brenner was thrilled to be back in action—bursting with new ideas for bass riffs and beats. But he’d also been hesitant to start up their touring machine, having enjoyed the experience of working on the soundtrack for Boots Riley’s 2018 dark comedy film, Sorry to Bother You.
“We’d basically been on tour since 2009, and I was just wanting to be in the same spot for [a bit],” he says. “That was the first time either of us had scored anything, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you can make music from home and not have to tour?’ I was really excited about making the record, but I was also like, ‘Let’s take our sweet time and get other scoring gigs, and find a way to make a living outside of touring.’”
The success of Sorry to Bother You quickly led to another film score for an as-yet-unreleased documentary, and they also earned a series of remix and production offers. (One key gig: Brenner remixed a track his dad, the boogie woogie pianist Craig Brenner, had recorded 10 years earlier.)
“We were like, ‘What if we can make it work by scoring more films?’” Brenner recalls. “It changed my whole idea of what my future was going to be. All of the sudden, I was like, ‘I don’t have to sit around in a van for six hours a day and drive to rock clubs?’ Having that stability of just being in the same place for the first time in a while—it was really exciting. I know Merrill was unsure of moving forward with Tune-Yards as a rock project, and I was really excited about making music in other ways. I was excited about supporting a band, a solo artist or a director—helping someone else’s artistic vision.”
But, while assisting other artists was rejuvenating, Tune-Yards eventually wound up supporting their own vision— starting with the mountains of material they generated in their downtown Oakland rehearsal space, which is home to the sprawling gear collection they’ve amassed over the past decade or so. “There’s a drum kit there. There are a couple drum machines. There’s an obscene amount of synthesizers and vocal mics,” Garbus says, while laughing at the actual size of the space. “The idea was to start with something, start anywhere.”
They took a structured, day[1]job approach to their free-form experimentation: Garbus and Brenner collaborated on music five days a week, with an occasional bonus “Sunday Funday,” writing and tracking their next set of tunes both together and individually. “Maybe [we’d] hook up four different drum machines and go back and forth or maybe one of the drum machines was feeding into the [Korg] MS-20 synth,” Brenner says, outlining one of many possible scenarios. “We’d be recording everything, and maybe I’d pick up the bass and start improvising, and Merrill would sing with a live vocal mic.”
The aim was just to record patterns that they could later edit into songs— inspired by Garbus’ weekly pre-pandemic DJ gig at an Oakland bar, they essentially treated their own sonic seedlings like a library of samples that they could freely pilfer through. It’s an unorthodox way to write a pop song, but Tune-Yards have long devised unique creative shortcuts and problem-solving techniques. For example, Brenner will often improvise around different bass parts, recording the same bits in different keys, knowing they’ll “need [arrangement] possibilities at some point down the line.”
To keep the ideas flowing, they even utilized what Garbus calls a “randomization exercise”: rolling a trio of 12-sided dice and using the numbers to outline the structure of a riff or melody. “This is the time signature; we’re gonna have 10 measures of four, then a measure of two,” the singer says, citing an example. “We were basically doing anything to trick ourselves into composing anything.”
They eventually arrived at some of their strangest, most sophisticated songs—like the album centerpiece “Homewrecker,” a marvel of chromatic vocal melody and distorted funk rhythm that finds Garbus twisting and pitch-shifting her voice into unnerving tones.
“Merrill wrote the beat for a rapper who’d asked her to make one,” Brenner says. “The artist was someone we’re both fans of, and when she sent it to him, he was like, ‘This sounds so good, but I already have three or four songs on the album at this tempo.’ And I was like, ‘That’s great news! Now we can use it!’ Then I recorded the bass line. I probably just recorded a bunch of stuff, before leaving to go to the Y. And then Merrill took all the cool parts and turned them into what it is now. She’s so good at seeing something [in an idea]—maybe that means looping one bar or just creating this amazing bass line, or any kind of part, that started with what I laid down.”
“Homewrecker” was also crucial moment for Brenner as a keyboard player. While crafting his piano part during the bridge section, he wanted to travel into a “completely different world.”
To accomplish that goal, he developed a system of chord changes spiritually inspired by jazz great John Coltrane’s “Coltrane Matrix,” famously heard on 1960’s Giant Steps.
In fact, when the pandemic hit, Brenner delved even further into his keyboard studies, taking piano lessons once a week via Zoom.
“I was like, ‘OK, we’re not gonna tour, so I’m gonna try to work on some things I really need to put time into,’” he says. “One of those things is the piano. It’s been really helpful [compositionally]. It makes me realize things I didn’t think about before as a bassist—like all the subtle differences between, say, a C major chord or a C major 9 chord or a C major 7.”
(He’s also started to notice previously unseen connections between different musical disciplines: “I was recently playing some Beethoven, and I was like, ‘That sounds just like Radiohead!’”)
Their experience working on Sorry to Bother You also bled over into sketchy on a sonic level, even boosting Garbus’ confidence in the vocal department.
“I’m not a fucking opera singer, but I can do some shit,” she says with a laugh, noting how she’s learned to manipulate her sound by tweaking effects on a sampler. But they labored over all that knob-twiddling for a specific purpose. The eeriness of her “Homewrecker” vocal underscores the song’s core message: “How do you talk about being a white person, an active gentrifier in music?”
“It needed to be disturbing and troubling from a sonic point of view,” Garbus says. “What’s helpful to me, lately, is this idea of horror music. A similar thing happened on our last album during the song ‘Colonizer.’ There’s this sing-song-y, ‘I’m innocent!’ kind of vocal to go along with the sense that the world is crumbling underneath it. The [sampler] was helpful in manipulating the vocal to [reflect that]. I always talk about [German playwright] Bertolt Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect: ‘Don’t take these words at face value.’ Then it’s the idea of, ‘How can we do that in terms of music production? How can I cast doubt on myself?’ And also not lose myself in my own self-indulgent self-pity. There’s a lot of George Clinton [influence] in that song too, with that lower octave vocal—again, probably in a suspicious and disturbing way. But I’m trying to speak about the experience of being a gentrifier.”
She interrupts herself, adding, “Ugh, it’s been gross to talk about this at all. But that’s the whole point, right? How do you express disgust at one’s own experience of that? By digging though it.”
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Sketchy does dig deep into social issues—but more nimbly, and often less overtly, than on their previous LP. On the atmospheric slow jam “My Neighbor,” Garbus focuses on gentrification through the lens of one particular character, described lyrically as “the loneliest woman [she] ever saw.”
“It came out of witnessing, out our window, some disturbing neighbor stuff,” she says of the LP’s penultimate track. “It’s definitely not a person I have any knowledge of. It’s a songwriter’s rumination based on a conflict on a front lawn. It was partially about learning a lot about whiteness and where white people come from. This was a white neighbor and, to me, it’s really interesting to be in Oakland and see older white people who have lived here their whole lives—how they deal or don’t deal. We’re so used to the word ‘gentrifier’ but, of course, the romanticized history of California is the story of white settlers.”
On the crackling, often dissonant “Hold Yourself,” Garbus manages to weave together several intriguing threads: the concept of “parents as children,” how those same parents’ decisions have “betrayed” their children and, most strikingly, the existential terror of bringing a child into a terrifying world stained by climate change. (“Child, I won’t have you/ I cannot have you,” she belts on the track over a trip-hop drum crunch and woozy keys. “Child, I won’t have you, and I’m telling you why.”) Though “Hold Yourself” was written pre-pandemic, its themes, as Garbus acknowledged on Twitter, “seem even more relevant today”—only months later, the stakes of every decision and reflection feel twice as massive.
“It’s interesting how many people— fans and friends—I’ve already heard from about that,” she says, highlighting the theme of deciding against parenthood. “A couple people have been like, ‘Thanks for talking about that.’ Maybe I’m just not listening to the right people, but I feel like it becomes this passive choice instead of ‘I did think about this, and I made this decision.’ For me, there are a lot of people saying: ‘You should have kids.’ And there are the arguments like, ‘It’s important for good people to have kids.’ For me, there’s this whole thing behind it: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ I fucking love kids, and, on the one hand, I would love to have kids. And yet, I sound very decisive in this song, and I feel pretty decisive about this. But it still feels pretty vulnerable. I’m 42 now. Maybe, at 52, I’ll be like, ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’”
Though she’s prone to questioning the project’s help-to-harm ratio, hopefully, Garbus will still be writing Tune-Yards songs at 52—few songwriters have successfully navigated such big issues, at this level of artfulness, with such sensitivity. Plus, she wants to reach even more people. “We live in structures which really would rather us be separate,” she says, reflecting on the demographic of Tune-Yards’ audience. “There are a lot of different people listening to this music.”
She thinks back to the group’s 2011 track “Powa,” an indie-rock slow-burn about the “complexities of power in sexual dynamics.” Many fans “across the board” have reached out to share their reactions—feedback that she still finds “helpful” artistically.
“I wrote that song with the idea that no one was listening,” she says. “If I knew how many people would eventually hear it, then I would have thought that the subject matter was something far too vulnerable to write about.”
But vulnerability, for Tune-Yards, is now essential.
