Interview: tUnE-YaRdS

tUnE-YaRdS, The lo-fi bedroom folk project of Merrill Garbus, has been an album of the year contender for me since I first heard it a few months ago. Delightful ukeulele melodies, collages of recorded sound and some truely playful and interest lyrics make for the pleasant surprise of 2009 in my opinion. Album is out now on Marriage Records, and I can't suggest it enough, you can buy it here. Merrill was great enough to find time in her busy touring schedule to answer a few questions just for us, flattered to say the least.

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Ben: Where did your love for alternating caps come from? That was what first made me check out your early singles, your very busy name and album title. Is it simply a matter of catching the eye of people who might stumble on your material or any deeper meaning?

Tune Yards: I’m glad to hear that it attracted you instead of repulsed you—that was definitely part of my intention. It all started with wanting to write my myspace name differently. I sort of couldn’t believe that I was putting music on myspace finally, and it depressed me that I was one of 8 million people doing the same thing. I felt like I was in a herd of cows. So it was a bit of a strategy, first of all, to just stand out from the hordes. But it also felt better to be slightly problematic for people, to make them slow down a bit when they wrote my name. I think it’s really easy to feel like a piece of dirt in the music industry and it became my way of resisting against people easily disposing of my music, or easily categorizing or simplifying me as a musician.

BC: Aside from ukulele, the bulk of the material on BiRd-bRaInS was done with a microphone and voice recorder. It is a rather nontraditional set up, and I was wondering what your approach is when writing songs when so much of it is done with your voice?

TY: For bird-brains (you can capitalize it anyway you want, I won’t be offended, I change it up all the time!) I wrote most of the songs on ukulele first. It’s very satisfying to sit by yourself with a small pretty instrument and make things up, and in that time in my life it was a life-saver, a sort of therapy, I guess. The recordings were built out of snippets of sound as beats, and other instruments through that voice recorder, but the basis was a folky-sounding ukulele song.

Now that I’ve been performing so much with a looping pedal, I’ve started to write a bit more through live improvised stuff, where voice and percussion are the main elements. That’s also fun because when I’m rehearsing and writing with the looping pedal, it’s like being a kid and yelling and doing shows for yourself. Except I eventually have to remember that there will people watching me later on down the road. Sometimes I write stuff live, and people in the audience have to deal with me talking about poop or something inappropriate because that's what's on my mind at that particular moment.

BC: Your website brings up all of the experiences that you went through over the 2.5 years that you spent creating your debut album. From trips to Africa to being a Nanny out on Cape Cod, what events or periods in your life had the most influence on you as far as writing your lyrics go.

TY: My lyrics are very influenced by my time in Africa, even though I was there almost a decade ago. I think a lot of them involve trying to sort out what happened to me there. It was a time when I felt very ashamed of my own existence, and unable to see what I was worth in the world. But I also felt so angry about the systems that keep some people impoverished and others wealthy—felt angry that I was indirectly responsible for poverty, for violence, for crime, because of the system and county I was born into. That sounds simplistic and idealistic, I suppose, but pretty much everything I do and think about comes down to questioning that reality, the reality of injustices like rich and poor, and how to remain some kind of joyful being despite needing to constantly wrestle with them.

But of course some of the songs are about breaking up with someone and stupid singer-songwriter sappy stuff. The hard times in my life clearly provide the most fuel for lyrics. It was also a hard time for me when I was a nanny, helping to raise the most wonderful kid but realizing how I had to, to a certain extent, put my life aside for his.

BC: Originally, BiRd-bRaInS was put up online for donations only but then you were picked up by Marriage Records who are now putting the album out on vinyl. Was it your intention from the beginning to get signed to a label, or was it simply a result of the buzz that you have been picking up this year?

TY: That’s a good question. As success has come to me I’ve been questioning my original intentions, because it’s easy to get swept up in what you should want, versus what you really wanted in the beginning. No, in the beginning I was just excited for more people to hear my music in a complete form, in a neat package of an 11-song album. I had had 3 or 4 recordings that people were excited about, and I just wanted to do more. I love recording, it's the coolest, especially on my own when I can create whole worlds in my bedroom. And I really just wanted to go on tour and have cassette tapes to sell. It was my dream and it really happened! Thanks to my friends who helped me dub 800 cassette tapes, spraypaint them, make covers for them and cut them...that was so much work.

However I am a very driven person and I think that I did want a certain level of recognition. I had been hoping for labels to be interested, though I wasn't really clear what the advantage of a label was because I was booking my own shows and selling records (cassettes!) on my own. Marriage was not only interested, they’re also a small and conscious label that releases fascinating, and top-quality records. So I was interested in them, too, and we seemed to fit well with each other.

I think since then my dream has turned into making a living for myself out of music, and that necessarily means making a few different choices than hopping in a car and playing in people’s basements and rejecting label offers. I do like the recognition in that I can tour more, and play for more people, and play WITH more people. Maybe later I'll realize that I've gotten away from my original intentions, but I think my need to create my own music will carry me through a lot of decision-making. I sure hope so.

BC: For a while now you have been getting quite a bit of buzz both on the internet and in real life. You have opened for the liked of Thao and the Get Down Stay Down and more recently Beruit and have had major outlets such as Pitchfork and Stereogum singing your praises. Did you ever expect to have so much hype before your first album was even physically released? Is it overwhelming or are you just enjoying the new found popularity?

TY: Totally overwhelming. I’m not good with being exposed. I can’t read blogs for myself or look at pictures, my boyfriend does it for me and tells me stuff.

At the same time, I’m not Lady Gaga or anything. The lucky part about being a bit different is that you don’t sail as smoothly down the fame trail as others do, so I think it’s going to take me a while to be in Rolling Stone, thank goodness.