tUnE-yArDs, In Her Own Words

Merrill Garbus first began creating her homemade tracks as tUnE-yArDs back in 2006, using a voice recorder and looping devices to construct her unusual combination of ukulele, percussion and booming soulful voice. Her self-released LP BiRd-BrAiNs struck a chord with fans and bloggers alike, and 4AD picked up on tUnE-yArDs’ raw and honest music. Soon she was teaming up with bassist Nate Brenner, and recording in a pro studio – but the extra polish didn’t detract from the vibrancy of the music, rather it amped it up in her album w h o k i l l, projecting her mixture of global folk rhythms, indie pop sensibilities and heartfelt politics into a widescreen, yet concise voice.

Not one to shy away from politicizing her music, tUnE-yArDs has been involved in many charitable endeavors, from Hurricane Sandy to Community Water Center, adding depth and a sense of social responsibility to her music. tUnE-yArDs’ third album Nikki Nack continues the pair’s development, covering just as many new sounds and ideas while retaining that essential tUnE-yArDs buoyancy. In this excerpt from her recent interview with RBMA Radio, Merrill talks about her early influences and walks us through her trio of full-lengths.

Dave Matthews and Michael Jackson

I grew up with square dance musician parents basically. My mom played the piano and the accordion, still does. My dad plays the fiddle and banjo. They met playing square dances in New York City and then got married.

Middle school was not the best time for Merrill Garbus. I had two worlds; one was the home world, where in retrospect I got a very interesting music education from my parents. My dad started playing the alto saxophone and got obsessed with jazz; we were constantly surrounded by that. My mom, meanwhile, was playing Bach and Beethoven. There was a constant flow of interesting music and musicians coming in and out of our household.

At school, I was listening to a lot of Dave Matthews Band, as well as REM and Red Hot Chili Peppers a little bit. At the end of high school, we were going to concerts all the time. Beastie Boys, Ani DiFranco. The Dave Matthews Band culture was fascinating to me. You go to a stadium full of thousands of people, and there would be this dream-like sound. With arena rock there’s a lot of natural reverb, and crazy amounts of uncontrolled sound. They really capitalized on that, I think. They had the fiddle, the saxophone, these really dreamy chords. I remember being very physically moved by that music.

I’m slightly embarrassed to say that, because it’s one of those bands I don’t listen to a lot right now. I’m trying to be less snobbish about what music hits me. Pop music hits people in so many different ways and I like to forgive. I’m sure people will be talking about tUnE-yArDs this way in the future. They’ll be like, “I used to listen to tUnE-yArDs. Sorry, I know that’s really dorky.”

Through my life, Michael Jackson was always the number one inspiration for me. I used to put Band-Aids around my fingers, because he had bandages on all of his fingertips for some reason. I still think he made the best pop music of our time.

Old Timey Music

My dad bought me a fiddle when I was a senior in high school. I started studying a little bit with him, and studying old timey music. There’s a kind of grit and a real bluesy soulfulness you can get in a lot of the old timey playing. That music is very deeply ingrained in me. I think the fiddle is an interesting instrument because it does a lot of the same things that voices do. It’s these four stringed voices right in your ear. There’s something about having that vibration right next to your head.

A Cappella Music

I was really obsessed with a cappella groups at college. The a cappella groups were pretty much the coolest people on campus. They were the rock stars. I wasn’t obsessed with the coolness factor, but I wanted to sing that music for sure. I wanted to learn how to arrange music that way. I was spending a lot of hours dissecting pop songs and understanding, “What is the bassline doing?” “How do I create what’s happening rhythmically with voices?” In retrospect, that was priceless training.

Puppetry and the ukelele

When I graduated from college, I got a job at a place called Sand Glass Theater in Vermont. They were looking for an intern to run sound for their puppet shows. I spent four years training with them, and eventually became part of a few touring shows. In that process, it became very clear to me that I needed to be working on my own art. I knew I wouldn’t always want to be part of someone else’s art.

My time in theater was, in retrospect, a very important focus for me. If I was going to do a solo puppet show, then I needed an instrument that could fit in a small puppet theater. My friends suggested the ukulele as an instrument that was both small enough and creepy enough to accompany the story I was telling at the time. (About a mother selling her child to the butcher.)

BiRd-BrAiNs

The first tUnE-yArDs recordings came about in an odd way. A friend gave me a voice recorder and I had this free software, Audacity. I started putting sounds into the computer and multi-tracking them. I couldn’t believe my luck that this crazy dictaphone thingy had awesome compression. Every track came out sounding awesome. That was when I started using found sounds. I would take pieces of wood and slap them against each other, sample it, then loop it. The song “Lions” is me slapping pieces of wood together in an empty room.

“Hatari” was the first song where I said, “I’m on to something.” It was because of that middle section where I just stopped and said the words, “There is a natural sound that wild things make when they’re bound. It rumbles in the ground, guraw, guraw, we all fall down.”

I recorded a lot of BiRd-BrAiNs in Montreal. It was a very hot summer, and I had a cheap room in this apartment because there were no windows. There was a lot of sweaty misery. It was so hot when I was recording “Fiya” that I had gone out into the front of the apartment where there was a little bit more breathing room, but you would get all these street noises. There were these kids playing outside, just screaming, “FIRE, FIRE, FIRE!” I really miss recording that way. There was so much room for the unexpected to happen.

4AD

I was always extremely skeptical of record labels. I saw a lot of people waiting on record labels to legitimize their music. I was just getting in my car, booking shows and calling people up in different cities. Patrick and I spent hours and hours of our lives hustling. I saw that get us really far, touring and selling records and creating a lot of attention that way.

I did a show for my 30th birthday in Montreal, and that was where Jane Abernethy, who ended up signing me to 4AD, came and saw me. In retrospect, I ended up with one of the greatest labels that I could imagine. They put out extremely interesting, groundbreaking pop music and they’ve been so good to me. At that point, I was so protective of what tUnE-yArDs was. I’m glad I was. I have been able to protect my vision, and I was right in thinking it was worth a lot.

w h o k i l l

At end of the BiRd-BrAiNs tour, I was opening for all these bands that I had respected so much like Dirty Projectors. When I opened for them, I was terrified of being solo in these bigger clubs. I’m not even sure how big those clubs were now; I think probably 300 or 400 people. I was terrified because I knew, rightly so, that low-end, bass frequencies were missing. I could do some of that with the looping pedal and the floor tom, but really that driver of rhythm, the bass, was something I had always wanted to bring in.

So I asked Nate Brenner to come on tour with me. Nate and I started playing these songs together, including “Gangsta,” Bizness” and “Powa.” And the songs kind of came into their own when Nate wrote these incredible bass parts to accompany them.

“Bizness” also was clearly influenced by Tony Allen and Afrobeat in general. I was really trying to dissect rhythm at that point, trying to come up with something more interesting than what I had done thus far. Before “Bizness,” the songs that were done on the looping pedal were more straightforward.

Nikki Nack

After the w h o k i l l tour, I really needed a break from music in general. I wanted to get more in touch with my body. After that long bout of touring, I felt like I had no physical connection to my body at all. I decided to take Haitian dance classes. I got really interested in the drumming first, I certainly didn’t know how to do any of those movements. It was a very, very challenging dance, and I truly loved doing it but I was not good at it at all. I would get kind of scared to go to class.

I was playing drums for the dance class too. It was a wonderful experience to be responsible for the rhythm. There was this real out-of-body experience that would happen when all of us would be playing these intersecting drum parts. It was hard to clench on to your own part. In fact, it was easier if you could just have your hands physically remember what you were doing, and then give over to the entirety that the drums were creating.

It was so invigorating to have this introduction to an entirely new world of music. I ended up going to Haiti in 2013 to attend the rituals around the Easter holiday. I took a lot of dance classes in Port-au-Prince. Then we went to see these rituals at Souvenance, which felt like a privilege and a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“Water Fountain” is a song that started from walking around Lake Merritt. There was one water fountain that looked really cruddy. I was thinking a lot about the deterioration of cities, and people being so against putting their tax dollars toward anything. That was a big part of the national conversation at that point, as it is constantly. I was thinking about how if no one paid taxes, certain parts of cities would just be completely ignored and decrepit.

On that song, I also wanted to include the three-two clap. I went to New Orleans a few months before that, and did a workshop with this organization that’s now called RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) that works with artists to incorporate activism and social justice work into their touring and recording lives.

We had a lesson on the three-two, and how it was really an African rhythm that came right from slaves in Congo Square in New Orleans. There is an incredible lineage of that rhythm that you can see throughout jazz, R&B, rock & roll. I think I had learned that before, but to really have that broken down was incredible.

Nikki Nack was all about figuring out new ways of doing things. On “Find a New Way,” I was using a drum machine on the iPad. If you play too fast for the computer to accept, it will create rhythms for you. You’re just going “da-da-da-da-da-da” and that ended up creating all these variations. Abusing technology to spit out new compositions was really exciting to me.