Merrill Garbus is tUnE-yArds. And she cares even less for stereotypes than she does for cases. Her influences are many, her sound is lo-fi, her style is homespun . . . and her look is exactly what she wants, she tells SINÉAD GLEESON
‘EVERY DAY, one of the things I dreamed of once upon a time, actually comes true.” Merrill Garbus, breathlessly marching up a hill in search of coffee on a sunny California morning, can’t quite believe the year she’s had. Rewind 12 months, and her tUnE-yArDs project was in its infancy, playing shows in people’s basements on a tour she financed herself.
In September, she supported The Dirty Projectors in Dublin and the post-gig consensus was that she had almost blown her hosts off the stage. Not bad for a woman possessed solely of a drum, a ukulele and a blustery voice that dips and weaves like a kite.
“The stage part of what I do comes from my background in theatre. How I am on stage is a big part of what people respond to. The first album was made before this live show really existed, so when I started out, it was just me quietly looping my ukulele. Now I’ve added a bass player, which allows me more flexibility about what I can do. I access a similar sentiment on stage now to the one I used to use in puppetry.”
Garbus studied theatre for four years, and one project, a solo puppet show called The Fat Kid Opera, provided something of an epiphany about the direction her love of performance was heading in. "It made me realise it was the songs that had the power – and that maybe I didn't need to be fidgeting with all this other stuff. Something I've kept from my puppeteering days is a sense of demanding that an audience not only pay attention, but get involved in the performance."
Growing up in Connecticut, her family background had a strong musical slant. Her mother, a piano teacher, gave her lessons until her early teens and her father taught her how to play the fiddle (including several Irish tunes). Sister Ruth plays drums with Sub Pop band Happy Birthday and is a member of Feathers. Garbus admits that despite such proximity to music, it “kinda drifted away” from her for a while, but she never lost touch with it. “I always thought music became a side thing for me back then, but in retrospect, I was still very involved. I was always in choirs and was in an a capella group in college.”
It’s interesting to hear that at a time when Garbus considered herself slightly alienated from music, the projects she was involved in were heavily vocal. There’s no doubt these collaborative workouts not only encouraged her to experiment with sound, but have shaped and moulded her voice. And it’s that voice that has caused the superlatives to fly. Ranging from feral to Amazonian, part ululation, part punk siren, it is the central cog in her DIY musical aesthetic.
The tape-hiss feel to the songs is a fundamental element of the tUnEyArds sound. It’s what marks it out from over-polished pop and it’s one of the reasons Garbus thinks people like what she does. If puppetry has influenced her physical approach to performance, there is a vast bedrock of sound under the surface of her songs. She thinks of the songs as pop and hopes the world “will see beyond the lo-fi nature of it”.
Given the broad palette of influences on the record, it might sound surprising to hear Garbus so unashamedly planting a flag in pop territory. “My focus is on bending the definition of the pop genre. When I started making music, it was an avant-garde folk thing because I was playing ukulele, but now – in my mind, anyway – the tUnEyArDs albums are pop. I adore Beyoncé, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson. They’re amazingly inspirational figures in a genre that is pooh-poohed because of it accessibility. People are always surprised when I cite Woody Guthrie as an influence, but it’s that same accessibility; of being involved in people’s stories.”
BiRd-BrAiNswas self-recorded on a digital voice recorder, and Garbus used free editing software to multi-track it. Aware that this is as basic as recording gets, she is blown away by the success of the album. "I really like these songs, and as soon as I started this method of making recordings, I was intrigued by it. I was bored by so much pop music and dismayed by a music culture where faults are not allowed in recording studios anymore. There are just so many techniques that take the human element out of recording."
Garbus admits it was a “time-consuming and private way of recording”, but it gave her the autonomy to make her album sound exactly the way she wanted it to. “I knew I was breaking so many recording rules, but I liked how things sounded. Although it was embarrassing when 4AD [her UK label] sent the album to Abbey Road to be mastered and the engineer was like, ‘you CAN’T do this’.”
This resistance to doing what people expect extends to her tUnE-yArDs name, (yes she likes the mixed capitalisation, but only did it to stand out in the infinite sea of MySpace profiles). There is something very uncompromising about Merrill Garbus, even though she’s warm and self-deprecating with a big laugh. She talks of overcoming shyness and self-loathing; of learning to accept herself and being vociferous about control of her own music.
“As soon as I began recording these songs in the way that I did, I decided I was going to be stubborn about it. I’ve met women in music and we’ve all felt that lack of power, with people telling you what to do, because it’s so male-dominated. I’ve worked with great guys, but sometimes there is a sense that men don’t understand what the experience of a woman artist is. If you do things differently, you can get a lot of flak for that. I didn’t intend this record to be a feminist statement, but it turned into one right before my eyes.”
On stage, Garbus – perhaps in a throw back to her theatre days – often appears with her face daubed with paint. It’s a statement about art as much as it is about physicality, and the conversation turns to women in music and the pressures placed on them regarding appearance.
“I’ve never felt conventionally beautiful, and one of the reasons I quit puppetry was because I had this fear of being on stage. There was a sense that if I didn’t look like everyone else, I didn’t belong there. With music, I dodged this expectation that I would be a slim, porcelain-faced woman, but I still get amazingly cruel comments online about my physical appearance. I’m not a skinny blonde woman, but there’s a punk-rock spirit where you don’t have to be pretty, and neither does your music. It’s something I value about the genre I’m in: the ability for women to be ugly when performing. And I’m intentionally ugly on stage.”
Her next album is at a tentative stage, but she plans on working with several female contemporaries such as Thao Nguyen, White Hinterland’s Casey Dienel and New York noise artist Bora Yoon. “I have no idea what the next record will sound like, but I’m dedicated to human flaws being a part of it.”
- TUnE-yArDs' album
BiRd-BrAiNsand current single
Live Fleshare out now on 4AD. She plays Whelans, Dublin, tonight.
