words in edgeways with tUnE-yArDs

If you had to pinpoint a single lyric on tUnE-yArDs’ second album
w h o k i l l that best encapsulates the record’s themes, the glaringly obvious candidate is the line in ‘Riotriot’ where the music breaks off and Merrill Garbus’s voice sails through with a weightless cry of “There’s a freedom in violence that I don’t understand”. But it’s the canny addendum, “And like I’ve never felt before”, that really nails its relevance, putting Merrill herself in the midst of the savagery. The desire to confront violence, or the threat of violence, is something that has been germinating in her since childhood, arising at first from a fear of kidnapping and crime within the wealthy Connecticut suburb her family idiosyncratically called home. “I was a pretty worried child, and very protective of my little sister, Ruth,” she tells me over a steaming mug of tea in a North London pub. “None of us really felt at home there. I was sort of obsessed with crime and I always had this sense of a certain amount of vulnerability, which I really resented.”

In Merrill’s world at that time, however, there was little precedent for facing up to such fears. Within her community, there was a sense of not wanting to register violence for what it was, to face it not head on but with a turned blind eye. Yes, the women would be taught how to protect themselves and to defend against a would-be rapist or mugger, but the idea that women themselves could be perpetrators of terrible violence was all but discounted. “Stereotypically, women are always so anti-violence, or afraid of violence,” Merrill explains, “so the idea that a woman could confront it and be a participant was a really huge thing to me.”

Merrill’s early musings on the subject of violence included writing a song about a woman suicide bomber (a territory also explored by Björk on ‘Hope’) and, with her now-defunct trio Sister Suvi, a song called ‘Violence, Wild Thing’ which included the lyric, “I killed a man / I shot him, I shot him”. BiRd-BrAiNs, her first album as tUnE-yArDs, explored her childhood paranoia within the suburbs and its “well-groomed lawns” on the song ‘Safety’, which ends with the gauntlet-brandishing, breakaway command of “Come-a come-a get me / I’m in your fucking city”. So the aggression of w h o k i l l doesn’t come without a warning shot; it’s a progression, a nugget of two decades of life on the edge of apprehension.

There’s a third angle on violence at play on w h o k i l l, and that’s what Merrill terms “violence against myself”. She doesn’t mean physically, but psychologically; her life, both professionally and personally, has changed immensely in the past few years, “mostly as a result of tUnE-yArDs”, and in this scenario violence can be seen in a different light. “There’s this element of change that feels like killing parts of myself, and that being a positive thing actually,” she explains. “I’m putting a new spin on violence by looking at it in terms of if things don’t die then other things can’t grow. It’s not less horrible in a way, but it’s necessary for me survive in the world. To kill those parts of myself, sever those limbs or whatever. And that’s something I continue to struggle with.”

A significant severance that Merrill has made in recent years was her decision to transplant herself from her adopted home of Montreal to Oakland, California, a place consistently listed among the five most dangerous cities in United States for the past twenty years. It was a move she made primarily in the name of love – her boyfriend and now full-time tUnE-yArDs member Nate Brenner lives there – but, by being the almost total antithesis of her childhood experience in New Haven, it turns out that Oakland was just what she needed to finally deal with her relationship with violence. I confess that my own experience of Oakland was a bit of a mixed bag in the danger department, and she smiles reassuringly. “It’s really a wonderful place to be. It’s diverse in the way that the world is diverse; in my area there are Chinese families, Hispanic families, Mexican families… I just love it.

“I don’t know if you have these experiences but when I’m in a neighbourhood where everything is clean and pristine, where things run smoothly and it’s mostly white people, I get this weird sci-fi feeling, that maybe I’m in an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’. I get this feeling that I’m not in the real world. Oakland may seem like leaning a little too far in the opposite direction, maybe, but I don’t think so. It’s terrifying at times, absolutely, but I don’t want to be separated or removed from that.”

Divisions are central to w h o k i l l‘s first track, ‘My Country’, which finds Merrill questioning “When they have nothing, why do you have something?” and “If nothing of this is ours, how will I ever know when something’s mine?”, and it’s clear that the high prevalence of poverty in Oakland – and, indeed, the wider US – is something that else that bothers, and betters, her. “I want to be confronted with poverty on a daily basis,” she tells me, drawing her hands inside the sleeves of her sweater. “Being confronted with poverty will make me want to battle against it and work for equality, even though that’s such a lofty idea; socialist, even. I think that’s the way. That’s what I need to see every day. And, you know, there’s a large African-American middle class in Oakland, so there’s a balance. Seeing black people also live successful, wonderful lives is where I want to be.”

In July 2010, Oakland hit the headlines again for all the wrong reasons when a white transport police officer was acquitted of second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter for the fatal shooting of a black community member, Oscar Grant, on New Year’s Day 2009. Agitated racial tensions spilled over into small riots, looting and arson in the city, leading to the arrests of nearly eighty people and widespread distrust among the Oakland community, which Merrill takes as the jumping off point for the w h o k i l l song, ‘Doorstep’, deftly detailing the fallout of a lover’s death with no hint of heavy-handedness. A similar story of civil unrest following the police killing of a teenage immigrant in Montreal inspired ‘Riotriot’, in which Merrill sings from the perspective of a girl who fantasises about the policeman who comes to arrest her brother, giving a whole new sexual meaning to that pivotal lyric.

When Merrill talks about “violence against myself” there’s one aspect of that which is not immediately obvious, though it’s perhaps the most aggressive entity of all: money. Now that she can afford to do tUnE-yArDs full-time, a fact she describes as “huge… and weird”, she’s having to come to terms with that fact that it is possible to make a living and still be responsible to her ideals, which isn’t necessarily easy. “In a lot of ways, I think it was way more comfortable being a starving artist, quote unquote, at least in terms of being respected by people. Like, ‘Wow, it’s so awesome that you do this despite having to work a job for thirty hours a week’ or whatever. So now I think that money has a violence of its own, and that it’s very powerful and I’m learning how to deal with it, and I will continue to learn how to deal with it. But learning to say that just because I’m making a living doesn’t mean that I’m selling out, that’s the first thing. It’s a new world of issues that I’m confronting on a daily basis.”

Being perceived as ‘selling out’ by moving from the resolutely dictaphone recordings of the first album to the more produced arrangements of the second obviously weighed heavily on Merrill’s mind while making the album. Part of Merrill’s strictly lo-fi manifesto for the recording of BiRd-BrAiNs stemmed from her self-professed deep fear of being homogenised and sounding like everyone else,
but having struggled through the first recording sessions for
w h o k i l l she seems to be a lot more relaxed on that front. “It’s funny. Lately I’ve felt like it’s sorta hard to homogenise me, you know. Seeing the project from the outside, and now having established myself as tUnE-yArDs in the way that I have, I feel more confident that people know what it is, that it’s still weird and it’ll always be weird. My voice is weird and my approach to songwriting is probably pretty weird. There’s enough that’s weird to tUnE-yArDs, so I feel that I’m probably clear at this point from homogenisation.

“That said, putting my song in a commercial makes me very frightened. [Merrill's song 'Fiya' was once used in a BlackBerry ad] So really I am still afraid of homogenisation, and I should be, because anything can be appropriated into mainstream… Do I want to be mainstream ever? I don’t know. Do I want what’s weird to be more mainstream? Maybe a little bit. But once I get there, I wonder how I will feel.”

Merrill once described BiRd-BrAiNs as her own personal mixtape, as in it was essentially a patchwork of her own recordings that she had meticulously crafted into a virtually seamless piece that flowed naturally from one song to the next. w h o k i l l, on the other hand, “feels more like an album-album” if only by virtue of having been recorded in the same city. Oakland’s New Improved studios “now feels like a second home,” she admits, pausing before adding, “Actually, it’s bigger than my apartment so sometimes it feels more like a first home. I feel so comfortable there, though it’s still hard to go at the songs with the same energy when you’re in the vacuum of a soundbooth with no audience, just the same people who’ve heard you sing all day.

“It’s hard when you’re talking about who really made the album, because there a lot of people involved, including all the audiences who helped to make the songs when I improvised on stage. Obviously, Nate was a huge part of shaping the songs, even the chord structures of some songs, and certainly the rhythm, where the whole thing sits in your butt. Eli Cruise, the engineer on the album, had a huge part too. He’d come out with sounds that I never would have thought of on my own. But I claimed producer credit because I oversaw the whole thing, and I definitely demanded that the songs turned out the way that they turned out – for better or worse. It’s interesting that it’s still hard for me to take up that space in the studio, and I have to constantly remind myself that it’s important. You need to stick up for your songs!”

There’s been a lot of talk this year about the so-called “death of lo-fi” as artists from across the spectrum of indie-rock one by one grow out of their distorted and heavily reverbed beginnings and into an era of higher fidelity. Given that the transition of tUnE-yArDs mirrors this shift, I wanted to get Merrill’s thoughts on whether the aesthetic’s days truly are numbered. Instead she laughs, says “Uh oh”, and bounces the question back at me: “What do you think?” My reply is the truth: that I am fully supportive of anything that encourages people to feel confident enough to pick up an instrument, that the embracing of lo-fi was very empowering and wonderful in a lot of ways, and that, to me, the death of lo-fi will never truly happen. She beams. “I agree. I totally agree.

“It’s an overdramatic statement that doesn’t take into consideration people across the world, who maybe don’t have access to fancy studios. The world of indie-rock is what it is, but people will always make home recordings. What does lo-fi even mean anyway?” For Merrill, it meant putting everything through a voice recorder; for other people it means using four-track tape or minimal production. There is no single definition, and what she learned with BiRd-BrAiNs is that while some fans would say that they completely connected with the album’s lo-fi sound, others said that they had to get past the fidelity issue to see the songs within. “Depending on who I talked to, people would be either encouraging me to do the vocals with a clean mic next time, or saying ‘Please don’t ever change the way that you sound!’,” she laughs. “And, you know, telling someone not to change is like saying, ‘Please die. Please just stop growing and thriving’ – I think it’s silly.”

That said, tUnE-yArDs fans fearing a Regina Spektor-like steep career curve from raw and idiosyncratic to sedate and polished within the space of a few albums can rest assured that Merrill has no intention of making a truly glossy studio record. The thing she still loves most about BiRd-BrAiNs is that the recordings are the very opposite of slick, and says that we can expect tUnE-yArDs to revert to a one-woman enterprise at some point in the future. “I think the reason why I want to do an album by myself again is to break rules. I have learned more rules over the past two years, which is great because now I know what to do ‘wrong’. I think that’s what appeals to people who listen to lo-fi music. On a studio record you wouldn’t hear a really blown out, overdriven vocal because the engineer would intervene. But it can sound overdriven in a good way, and I’ll always be interested in instances like that. I tried very hard with w h o k i l l to maintain that kind of human connection, and I hope the album serves as a good example of something done in a studio that doesn’t feel sterile.”

* * *

tUnE-yArDs return to the UK for End Of The Road festival in Dorset (September 2-4), and will also support Beirut at Brixton Academy (September 16). w h o k i l l is out now on 4AD.

Written by: Alan Pedder

Tags: BiRd-BrAiNs, merrill garbus, tUnE-yArDs, whokill

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2011 at 12:20 pm and is filed under feature, words in edgeways. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.