Merrill Garbus, aka Tune-Yards, was initially reticent about 4AD's advances, afraid of losing the sound of her home-made debut album on the follow-up. She's glad she made the leap of faith, she tells JIM CARROLL
IF THINGS had worked out differently, Merrill Garbus would have been a puppeteer. From what we know about Garbus today, it would have been a strange twist of fate. But she wanted to do something theatrical, so she moved into puppetry.
“Puppetry seemed exciting to me,” she remembers. “I love performance, and there’s a lot more improvisation and creativity with puppetry compared to the stereotypical theatrical thing of learning your lines and doing Ibsen.
“There’s very few people doing anything fresh or new in theatre. The traditional approach didn’t appeal to me, so I went into puppet theatre because it lent itself to these new exciting performance techniques that I wanted to try out.”
One of her earliest gigs as a puppeteer was with the Bread and Puppet theatre group in Vermont, where Garbus was involved in making huge, extra-large puppets that were used in protest marches and other large-scale performances.
“It was my first experience of hands-on art, you know. It taught me that art should be for everyone and art did not have to be expensive to do. I was 19 years of age and it was really empowering to see that do-it-yourself attitude in action.
Alas, Garbus and puppets went their separate ways. “I soon realised that the people who were making a living were working for cable television channels like Nickelodeon, and I knew that I didn’t want to be a muppeteer. I wanted to do avant-garde performance art and I realised that it wasn’t about the puppets, so I moved on to other things.”
Puppeteering's loss was music's gain. As Tune-Yards, Garbus has already produced two deeply infectious, thrilling albums. The first, Bird-Brainswas an idiosyncratic tribal gathering that featured Garbus making merry with a battered ukulele, creaky loops, a batch of crackly field recordings and a superb honk of a voice.
Her second album, Whokill,sees the whirlwind of energy and imagination that powered her debut lashed into service on an album that is full to the gills with tribal stomps, vivid sounds and gloriously wild tunes. It's both strange and spectacular, a record with a giddy, daring, dashing imagination at full pelt, but which also has some distinctive songs to back it all up.
For Garbus, Whokillis about unleashing a new take on the sounds she's been hearing all her life. "Clearly, all these influences have popped up along the way in my musical education. People say there's dub and reggae and Afrobeat, and I think there's also a a lot of experimental avant-garde jazz and folk on the album. When reviewers mention those things, I find myself nodding my head a lot."
She’s the first to acknowledge that the Tune-Yards sound is a pick’n’mix of widely flung musical delights. “Someone once said that Tune-Yards is an ethnomusicologist’s dream,” she laughs, “and I definitely wanted my music to be that when I was younger. I was constantly absorbing music from wherever I could get it.
“When I was in Kenya and Nigeria, I was constantly finding new sounds and trying to play them and understand them. I had been studying Swahili for two years in college knowing that I wanted to travel to east Africa, and I ended up in Kenya having lots of adventures like learning traditional Tarabu tunes by playing with local musicians. That process of assimilation has never stopped.”
Aside from the leap in songwriting quality between albums, there have also been some changes in how Garbus works. Her debut was a fuzzy, charming home-produced artefact, which she recorded when she was working as a nanny for a summer. All Garbus had to work with then was a hand-held digital voice recorder and laptop, hence why the album sounded rough around the edges.
But the new album sees her label, 4AD, firmly in her corner, so there was a budget for Garbus to use a studio, engineer and assorted gizmos she couldn't afford the first time around. She was initially reticent about the move. "Even though Bird-Brainswasn't critically adored, I liked it and loved the sound of it, and I suppose I associated Tune-Yards as a recording project with that sound and that album. I wasn't sure about the jump from a very lo-fi album, where I was in charge of everything, to a studio where I had to rely on someone else. I suppose the reluctance was also because I was a little unsure about what the next Tune-Yards album would sound like and what Tune-Yards would become in the future.
“But I found a good studio and a good engineer to work with in Eli Crews, and what he was doing instantly appealed to me because the process didn’t make the songs sound sterile. They sounded alive and as if they were going to the right place.”
She quickly realised, too, that the studio was a way to shape and embellish a new Tune-Yards sound. "I felt pretty blind going into the process, but when I started the demos for Bizness, I realised I could be on to a sound, and thought it deserved a lot of quality and we should go into a studio to get a different, less lo-fi sound than we had the first time. It wasn't the plan, but it quickly became clear that it should be the plan."
One of the themes that comes up again and again on Whokillis violence. "I don't think it was a conscious move, but the songs ended up being one after another about violence," Garbus says. "I was concerned about violence against myself, that I was killing parts of myself, and that's where the initial fascination came from. I was writing songs about these episodes of violence, these riots in Montreal and Oakland which I found myself on the periphery of, and I suppose a theme developed about how much violence there is around us in different situations.
“There’s a line about the complications of violence on the album which sums it up for me: ‘There’s a freedom in violence that I don’t understand and have never felt before.’ Everyone thinks that violence is bad and so much of it is negative. But it’s also complicated that it’s found in things which are not bad and can mean things which are positive down the line. I think that also feeds into what interests me about Tune-Yards; I want to be asking questions and not judging or preaching.”
One of the biggest shifts Garbus has had to contend with is adjusting to a certain level of success. When she recorded and released Bird-Brains, she never thought she'd be able to make a living from making and performing music. Now, she doesn't have to rely on food stamps or sleep in her car.
“I’ve been sceptical every step along the way. In the United States, we’re trained as artists to think that there’s nothing coming from our art, that we’ll never get paid for it, that there’s not a good career path for artists or no infrastructure to value what we do. There are a few crucial organisations who will help you out as an artist, but by and large you’re left to think that you need a day job or two day jobs to survive.
“Money was just never there, so I got used to getting on and making music without it. So as things have happened, like 4AD coming along, I’ve thought that it’s not going to last. What is going on now is completely different to what I used to know. I wasn’t looking for a record deal because I didn’t like thinking about my music as a product. But being on a label means the record is getting more exposure, and I’m not struggling financially as much as I was, and that’s such a relief.”
* Whokillis out now. Tune-Yards plays Whelan’s, Dublin, on June 17
