Tune-Yards: Observation of My Own Complicity
Eliot Lee Hazel
Merrill Garbus looks pained. It’s a bright Sunday morning in early March, and she’s downing a decaf cappuccino at a trendy little Brooklyn cafe in Williamsburg, nestled between a few people wired on caffeine and pastries. It’s cold out, with nothing resembling spring in sight. In a few hours, she’ll be on a flight to England for the first leg of a European tour. She just wrapped a short North American club run two days prior, only a few blocks away at the 1,800-person Brooklyn Steel. But none of that has to do with her pained expression.
Instead, she’s trying to explain the lyrics she writes for Tune-Yards (originally stylized as tUnE-yArDs).
“It’s impressionistic,” she says. “Maybe impressionistic is the wrong word. It feels like Dada sometimes or e.e. cummings—people who are using language in a way, where you’re like, ‘Huh?’ If this project is how I’m filtering the world through me and my experience, then the words come out of trying to express what that experience is, more than trying to narrate some sort of story,” she adds.
She looks less in pain now—hopeful, even.
Minutes later, though, the discussion gets deep into race and white privilege, something she’s thought about often over the last several years. But, unlike a lot of people these days, who hide behind social media walls to blast out their discourse, or shame family members and co-workers behind their backs, Garbus has looked inward, and is motivated to learn what is going on.
It’s a notion that shines through on Tune-Yards’ fourth full-length release, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, a dance-driven record that’s worlds apart from her 2009 debut BiRd-BrAiNs, which was mostly written by Garbus on her ukulele. Now, her beats and rhythms are sweaty, cathartic and ready for the club floor. But these beats are embedded with lyrics that feel like swirling thoughts that simply spilled out of Garbus—as if she was screaming into a diary, with little care for consistency and coherency, just in time for the reign of President Trump.
“I have an entire journal worth of thoughts, truly the weirdest shit ever,” she says while sipping her coffee. Faint smells of patchouli travel with Garbus, complementing her big colorful scarfs, baggy pants and a shirt that looks like she’s dressed in a cozy blanket. But as comfortable as her outward appearance may be, there hasn’t been much rest in the last several years. “I’m putting down a big mess on paper, and pretty much going to the ‘office’ every day and putting down musical ideas. Idea, idea, idea, idea. From there, it’s distilling and carving away. That kind of process means there’s a lot of trash.”
One of the album’s most powerful songs comes at around the halfway point. In “Colonizer,” she sings about “white woman tears” and using a “white woman’s voice to tell stories of travels with African men.” It’s a startling admission, but it’s the essence of who Garbus is these days and how she views her role in the world as a musician lucky enough to find a fanbase and fill marquee venues night after night.
Ask her about “Colonizer” and you can see her mind shift back to memories of her own life and how those feelings were birthed. She spent time in Kenya and Haiti, where she realized how much of a bubble the U.S. really was.
“It felt like it was my formative experience; it’s a very specific, white American, privileged experience,” she says.
Those are the types of thoughts she presents throughout the 12-song, 44-minute I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life. It can be jarring and sometimes disturbing. And, at the same time, it’s a sonic experience that feels very 2018, where Garbus is paving the way for how people in privileged positions—in this case, a professional musician—should look at their own life with a high degree of self-awareness and self-reflection.
Ask Garbus if she thinks this is a risky proposition or a slippery slope to ascend, and she’ll tell you what she thinks rather bluntly.
“It feels disgusting,” she says. “Which I think it should.”
Garbus was born in the Northern New Jersey town of Ridgewood, right outside of New York City. Her mom taught piano and her dad was an architect who worked for IBM for most of her childhood. Her parents met playing folk music and instilled in her, from an early age, the virtues of luminaries such as Doc Watson, Bach and Steely Dan. “My dad definitely rocked me as a baby to Pretzel Logic,” she says. “It’s deeply embedded.”
They moved around the Northeast, with stints in the Bronx and Poughkeepsie, N.Y., before settling in New Canaan, Conn., in the mid-‘80s. It was there that she was exposed to the pop and classic-rock radio stations coming out of nearby New York City, simultaneously filling her brain with things like Madonna, Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam, Michael Jackson and Led Zeppelin.
She attended Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and after college, spent some time working as a puppeteer—first in Putney, Vt. and then Brattleboro, Vt. That experience turned into a valuable tunring point in the Tune-Yards story—around 2005, Garbus was teaching puppetry at a summer camp in New Jersey and met future Tune-Yards bassist Nate Brenner, her primary musical collaborator and romantic partner since 2008.
After a brief stint living in Montreal and playing in an indie band, Garbus relocated to Oakland, Calif., where she would start Tune-Yards as a musical project in earnest.
She recorded the tracks that would become BiRd-BrAiNs during 2007 and 2008, with just a handheld voice recorder. The album featured her on the ukulele, and presented a mish-mash of found sounds, showcasing her interest in exploring different rhythmic patterns in her material.
Garbus moved to Oakland in 2009 and started working with Brenner on the material that would make up WHOKILL, her 2011 sophomore album and first for indie powerhouse 4AD. That record instantly put her on the global map, where, all of a sudden, she was touring Europe and the U.S., headlining mid-sized clubs and playing large festivals. WHOKILL also dramatically expanded her sound palette, where standout tracks like “Es-so” and “Gangsta” showcased a myriad of influences, from pop to African to psychedelic-rock. It immediately became clear that Garbus was not interested in making stereotypical indie-rock, and she certainly wasn’t interested in modern conventions about constructing a song or channeling her voice.
“[On that album, I was] using the looping pedal more than anything, as an instrument for the first time, really—especially as a compositional tool,” she says. “‘Bizness’ came out of working with a looping pedal and drums. ‘My Country’ was the same thing. A lot of those were ‘make a drum beat with acoustic drums, and a drum pedal, and use the ukulele to find the harmony and melody.’”
Tune-Yards’ 2014 release Nikki Nack found Garbus and Brenner exploring a bit more of their electronic side, but they didn’t fully commit to going full-on dance until it came time to start writing the material that would make up Creep. Garbus would lay down beats and rhythms in her studio in Oakland, and every Tuesday, once she was done for the day, she would head down to a local club to DJ. There, she would mix records with new sounds she had been working on, essentially testing out her latest music on club-goers in real-time.
At the same time, she was filling up journals with what she describes as “observation of my own complicity”—along with what she was witnessing in the world around her. Though Garbus says you’ll never be able to find a narrative in her lyrics, tracks like “ABC 123,” “Heart Attack” and “Private Life” certainly feel like some of her most intimate and personal to date—married with a more euphoric sound this time around.
The album can be a strange listening experience. As the title suggests, there’s something very deliberate about how life is these days and the sensations you can experience (or not) from other people—strangers who can look at you, analyze you, share and spread you without your knowledge or consent. On the song “Private Life,” Garbus sings, “I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna/ Hear my voice, hear my voice/ You would never guess what was living inside/ Of people like me and you/ Oh, will you erase what you embrace?” The lyrics touch on the eradication of inner thoughts, a prevalent theme in our current over-sharing, digitally obsessed culture.
But while she was writing the material for Creep, Garbus also began what can only be described as a transformative experience. She started attending a six-month-long meditation program at the East Bay Meditation Center, where she learned how to “unpack her whiteness.”
“White people generally have to go through a process of waking up out of the trance of white supremacy and privilege,” she says. “I’m just starting to do that. I expect it will take me the rest of my life; it’s important work to continue to hack away at.”
At that point, Brenner says, he also saw a change in Garbus that impacted the recording of the album. “The workshops really shaped a lot of her lyrical content on the record,” he says. “One of the biggest things I noticed was it seemed like her overall approach to making the record changed as well. After taking the course, making the album was much more of a long, slow, steady process. In the past, we really crammed in everything in a rushed adrenaline-filled frenzy. This time felt much more sustainable and healthy, and was filled with more confidence and fun.”
Garbus’ new outlooks has started to color her live show. She’s conscious that her audience is mainly white and, at times, seems to take meaning from her music that isn’t necessarily there.
“It’s not clear what’s happening,” she says. “A song like ‘Gangsta’—I wrote it with a completely different thing in mind, but people are the most excited these days during that song. It’s about gentrification so when a bunch of white people scream that at the top of their lungs at a Tune-Yards show, my hope is that the lyrics get into their brains and settle. And maybe they have an experience where they are like, ‘Oh, my god, that reminds me of this one lyric,’ and I’m thinking of my own role here.”
That, in itself, is a bit indicative of the Tune-Yards trajectory. Because the thing about this project is that there was never really a plan for it to become what it did. And Garbus will be the first to admit that there isn’t really a plan for the future.
“The way she thinks about music and writes music seems to constantly change,” Brenner says. “She’s always challenging herself, taking voice and drum lessons, learning new production techniques, and messing around with new synths, drum machines and samplers.”
For fun these days, Garbus has been getting into science fiction authors like Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler. And she wants to take a leap into production soon—she’s dabbled in recording other artists and hopes to work with a lot more.
“The music I’m listening to now is often strong women’s voices,” she says. “I want to hear these empowered women. I’m gravitating toward other women who are very bold and use their voices.”
She’s also been working on a massive annotation project, where she’s taking all the lyrics in Creep and creating a hyperlinked document—a “resource for fans” she says— that will point them “to a slew of rabbit holes, musical and lyrical influences, and questions.”
But as far as Tune-Yards goes, who knows? There could be more sounds, more new directions in the evolution or it could fall back to something Garbus rediscovered sitting on a hard drive somewhere. The plan is to unplan as much as possible, which, she says, was the essence of Tune-Yards to begin with.
“I always thought of it as a project,” she says. “I wanted it to have flexibility. I didn’t call it ‘Merrill Garbus’ because I didn’t want it to be just me. Of course people equate Tune-Yards with me, but it was always meant to be something larger than that.”
This article originally appears in the June 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.
