This year marks a decade since Tune-Yards’ breakthrough second album Whokill, and the Oakland, Calif.-based project remains as creatively vibrant and unpredictable as ever. Leading up to the release of their fifth studio album sketchy. (out now), Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner gifted us with a few mesmerizing late night TV appearances, bringing a puppet version of Garbus to Jimmy Kimmel Live to sing “hypnotized” and brightly colored bean bags to The Late Show for Stephen Colbert for a beautiful performance of “hold yourself.” that felt like a Bushwick loft’s version of the Wiggles.
For sketchy.‘s release, Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus answered 20 questions for Billboard, thoughtfully speaking on everything from her frustrations with perpetuating a system she doesn’t support to musicians’ pay to balancing “serious self-inquiry” with “the levity and joy that’s needed to keep going.”
1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?
I’m at home in Oakland, California. The winter brought a lot of cold and rain but the sun has finally come out, and it looks like it’ll be one of those bird-chirping spring days.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
I always cite the Bjork cassingle for “Human Behavior,” even though that seems kind of late in my life but…how late could it be if it was a cassingle?!
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and what do they think of what you do for a living now?
My mom was (and is) a piano teacher, so it’s not inconceivable that I’m a musician, too. My dad is an architect and mostly worked for IBM when I was growing up. I think they’re both really proud, since they are both artists themselves and know how hard it is to make a steady living this way.
4. What was the first song you ever made? Who did you play it for, and what was their reaction?
I believe it was, “Merrill and I Live in a Barrel,” with a grade school friend. The rhymes were key. Our parents were amused and then annoyed, I’m sure.
5. Who or what made you realize you could be an artist full-time?
I worked for full-time artists in my early 20s at Sandglass Theater, a puppet theater in Vermont. I saw how hard my bosses worked to keep the business afloat, while also developing new shows constantly, always having the next creative project in mind. It was my friend Patrick who convinced me that we could make money doing music. We started a band, Sister Suvi, together, after I had quit my job as a puppeteer, and I think because he had seen a bunch of Montreal bands break through in the early 2000s, he saw a pathway to making money and traveling the world. Without that perspective I never would have believed — I was doing pay-to-play gigs, open mics and noisy bars and the future did not look particularly bright.
6. What’s the last song you listened to?
“Moliva” by Johnny Clegg and Savuka. I had just mentioned it in an interview and went back to it to remember why I loved it.
7. What was the last concert you attended before quarantine?
Salami Rose Joe Louis, at SFJazz. I have no regrets about that being my pre-COVID last concert. Incredible band and really creative music.
8. What’s been the hardest part of being off the road during this time? The best part?
I think we mostly would have been off the road, anyway, but I definitely had my pandemic nostalgia moment watching a TV show that took place in Paris. I remember going to the bathroom to sob. We’ve been incredibly privileged to see so much of the world on tour and I really miss having those experiences regularly. There are a lot of incentives to staying at home…we got a dog who, though she’s small enough to travel, wouldn’t have come into our lives had we not had significant time off the road. She’s the best.
9. You brought a lookalike puppet to your “hypnotized” performance on Kimmel. Did you make the puppet? I know you’ve been into puppetry for some time.
No, my old boss at Sandglass Theater, Ines Zeller Bass, built it, and her daughter Jana Zeller, who’s a really talented artist, painted it. I asked for a mini me and they delivered!
10. What do you get out of puppetry that’s different from music?
It takes a different kind of focus to work a puppet. I have to have intense focus to do the looping pedal work, but my face, my body, is so much of the performance. With puppets you have to bear witness. There’s a surrender of self involved. I was trained at Sandglass not to control the puppet, but to wonder what it wants to do, how it wants to be in its world.
11. When performing “hold yourself.” on Colbert, the way you walked across stage at the end of the song reminded me of puppet-like movements. What inspired the aesthetic of that performance?
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but yes; I’ve been enjoying movement where I’m doing less, and letting myself be moved by natural forces — I’ve learned a lot from a brief time taking Gaga movement classes with James Graham. The focus is on pleasure, versus needing to perform; to be really in yourself, present in your own experience, moment by moment. It’s a really good (and scary) practice of letting go of what you look like on the outside.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nABF2Wogq8
12. “hold yourself.” addresses feeling “betrayed” by parents. Was there a specific impetus for writing those lyrics?
Not directly related to my parents, no. That’s what sucks. My parents are great parents. I know they feel really sad about the world that’s left to the younger generations. But I kept seeing how I was perpetuating the very things that I didn’t believe in; that in this country specifically, we fool ourselves into thinking we can have what we have without others paying the price. We think we can keep driving and flying, buying food and clothes, and that these choices aren’t related to refugees at the border, wars and famine around the world, and exploitation of workers in our own country and abroad.
13. What do you hope a listener walks away from “hold yourself.” feeling?
A friend of mine said it gave her the feeling of being caught in a trust fall exercise. That’s probably the very best feeling I can imagine a song providing.
14. You did an incredible cover of the Breeders’ “Cannonball” for a 4AD compilation. Why did you choose that song?
It felt like such an obvious choice that I couldn’t believe another band hadn’t taken it. I adore that song. Kim Deal has that ability to go between coolest-girl-in-school-who-doesn’t-give-two-shits and that top-of-lungs scream…so hard to pull off. Plus the song form is really unique and the groove’s so hypnotic.
15. sketchy. is the name of the album. What’s sketchy about it?
It’s a sketchy time, and I hope the album reflects the time. “Sketchy” in that we can only see a thin outline of how things might look, and then in the “suspicious” meaning of the word, too. And I’m also wondering how we can keep an eye to how we, as white people, need to be skeptical of our actions and behaviors, while also not being so afraid of being cancelled that we don’t continue to do the work of digging ourselves out of whiteness. Maybe the album is trying to find the balance between that kind of serious self-inquiry and the levity and joy that’s needed to keep going.
16. What are your hopes for 2021?
I would personally like to see more solidarity; for people with power (myself included) to get behind the needs and demands of those who lack power. I hope we see more justice in how musicians are paid, for instance, and generally in how workers are paid and treated. I hope we see creative, honest, soul-searching choices in how people choose to re-enter the world, post-pandemic. I hope we can all be brave and consider what wasn’t working before COVID, and make those changes moving forward.
17. What venue are you most looking forward to playing post-quarantine?
Oh. So many. I’d play in a park gazebo at this point. I imagine that some of our favorite spots won’t have survived, but I’m hoping we can go back to Thalia Hall in Chicago, Union Transfer in Philly, and the Independent and Fox Theater here at home in the Bay Area. But there are so many…Mr. Smalls in Pittsburgh! Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland!
18. Why did you switch from the unusual capitalization of the band’s name to just Tune-Yards?
It had served its purpose. I used it back in the MySpace days to make the most out of my tiny icon…anything different to stand out! And I also felt that as a woman with a ukulele, I often needed to slow people down, especially journalists writing about me. If you couldn’t take the time to get my band name right, what else had you missed? At a certain point we were written about enough that I started feeling sorry for writers and editors. Some people still capitalize it that way, and that’s fine, too.
19. What’s the best business decision you’ve made during your career?
Beggars Group and 4AD have really done right by us. I put a lot of pressure on myself in the early years to stay independent, and not be controlled by a big label, but in a lot of instances, smaller labels had just as much “in perpetuity” scary long-term ownership of copyright. I chose to go bigger and reach more people, and I do think that’s why we still have a career that supports us.
20. If you weren’t a musician, what career would you have?
Burlesque performer? Roller derby skater? I don’t think I could get away from performing. The magician stilt-walker at the protest. In fact, maybe Tune-Yards is the way I’ve made that into a career, come to think of it…