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The handmade’s tale

Nomadic musician Merrill Garbus, aka tUnE-YaRdS, explains how Montreal, heavy puppetry and a two-year-old kid changed her life, and how she owns her work, but her work doesn’t own her

NUKULELE NOVELTY: Merrill Garbus

“I consider all art to be political,” says Merrill Garbus. “The fact that I recorded an album all by myself is a feminist statement in this day and age, when most musicians I know, but especially female musicians, have a hard time seeing that they can be a recording artist by their own efforts. For men as well—you don’t have to have approval or a master hand over your creation, it’s yours and it can be all yours.”

Staunchly independent and DIY, Garbus, better known as tUnE-YaRdS, spent two years collecting sounds to loop and layer with her vocals, ukulele, drums, odds and ends. A digital voice recorder and shareware mixing software were her production tools, the Internet her distributor—her debut album, BiRd-BrAiNs, to be released next week by British indie label 4AD, was initially sold online with a pay-what-you-can price tag, popularized by word of blog about her novel sound and gripping performances.

Born in New Jersey, raised in Connecticut and schooled in Massachusetts, Garbus is the daughter of a professional piano-teaching mom and fiddle-playing dad—they met playing their respective instruments at an early ’70s square dance in New York City.

Surrounded by music, Garbus absorbed everything from traditional songs to Top 40, and sang in choirs and high school musicals. In college, she spent half a year in Kenya as part of a study abroad program, and her exposure to African music fostered an obsession that would later emerge in her own compositions, a genre jumble of blues, folk and early 20th century pop fuelled by tribal rhythms, highlife plucking and a vocal instrument that ranges from siren (the sultry, singing sea nymph) to siren (the emergency vehicle noisemaker).

A chance meeting with Montreal’s Patrick Gregoire (formerly of Islands) at a New Jersey arts camp led to the blossoming of the tUnE-YaRdS project in this city, where she moved (unofficially—Vermont was her other home) to join his band Sister Suvi.

The Mirror called Garbus in Oakland, CA, where she had just signed a lease (she’s moving there next month to be with her boyfriend), to discuss what inspired tUnE-YaRdS.

Merrill Garbus: I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for Montreal. I was a truly depressed 26-year-old living with my parents, and the light at the end of the tunnel was going to Montreal to play small shows at [places like] Café Dépanneur on Bernard. They were really moments of magic and beauty, I could cry just thinking about it. It’s been really hard for me to leave Montreal because I’ve had so much incredible support from people there. The creative scene is so alive all the time and that was really amazing.

Mirror: Prior to moving here, you worked for four years as a puppeteer in Vermont. How, and why, did that happen?

MG: It was mostly by accident. When I was studying theatre, I wanted to get as far away as I could from traditional linear work, so I ended up focusing on any theatre that was physical, created collectively through explorations of movement and the body. I knew of an opening as an intern at Sandglass, where they were doing this crazy stuff using tai chi and breathing to inform their puppet manipulation techniques. It was heavy, theory-driven, adult puppet theatre.

M: Tell me about the first piece you created for them.

MG: I felt rather caged in by how ornate the Sandglass puppets were. I’m not patient enough to build things like that with my hands, so I built puppets out of pantyhose and created The Fat Kid Opera, a story based on a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift about eating Irish babies as a way to end starvation. It’s part of my lifelong obsession with eating and with the role of children in society, but it was also musical and funny.

M: What was the music like in Sandglass productions?

MG: They would often get a composer to come in and do very intricate recordings of orchestrated music for the shows. But The Fat Kid Opera is part of what made me shift to music because I wrote the songs, very dissonant and creepy songs. And I kept having visions of me in a frame holding a ukulele, so I started to learn the ukulele.

Cracking the cases

M: I read that working as a nanny to a two-year-old in Martha’s Vineyard provided a different kind of inspiration.

MG: The recording part of the tUnE-YaRdS project started during that time. I was spending up to 15 hours a day with this kid and I couldn’t help but be really fascinated by what he was fascinated by, which was everything. I started to bring that Sony recorder out with us and capture things that would pop out of his mouth for the first time. A lot of those sound clips of my time with him are on BiRd-BrAiNs. Seeing this utter curiosity of a two-year-old brought a feeling of innocence and the need to grow and to create. I really used that energy to plow through and get ’er done, all the things that adulthood discouraged me from doing, things I dreamed of doing.

M: As a part-time copy editor, I have to ask you, what’s with the mix of upper and lower case? And why tUnE-YaRdS, specifically?

MG: I was looking for a way to not only stick out as a practical thing—that my stage name would stick out more if it looked weird—but I find that a lot of people think “female singer-songwriter” and put it in a certain category, and I didn’t feel like the music was like that, it was something different so I wanted to provide a little friction, or be a little bit of a pain in someone’s ass, when they were typing my name.

It’s funny how some people are really rubbed the wrong way by it, like I’ve ruined their day by making them use that Shift key. But it sorta worked the way I wanted it to—people pay attention. I don’t wanna preach to people, but if there’s anything that I want from my audience, it’s a pause moment, and having people capitalize it that way perhaps gives them that moment to stop and think.

“Tune yards” comes from a lyric in an old, old song of mine. I like the idea that the songs aren’t me, that it doesn’t have to be Merrill Garbus the person with her heart on her sleeve and her words on the page. I’ve noticed that a lot of female artists have this idea that there’s a muse or some other power outside of themselves that is an inspiration, and for me that’s very important because that means I can have my own life as an individual that’s not linked to my failure or success as an artist. It’s the work that counts and the effort I put into it and the quality of life that I have.

Attention, please

M: It’s pretty clear that you draw on your theatre background when you perform. Did the collision of these two worlds come naturally?

MG: I’m still figuring out how to relate one to the other. At first, you have the challenge of absolutely no one knowing or caring who you are, and people generally drinking and talking while you’re playing, so as a matter of survival, I learned to use every tool that I have to centre everyone’s attention on me. Now The New York Times criticized my use of theatrics in my performance, so I guess I have people’s attention. But I’m not just a musician, I’m a theatre performer and a musician and there’s so much in the relationship between those two that I haven’t even begun to explore yet. It’s more than grabbing people’s attention, it’s about shaking people and engaging people in the experience of being involved in a performance and thereby being involved in being a human being. Whatever, it’s all a bunch of words right now, but I’m working on it. I’m 30, which feels both old and young at the same time, and the young part of me is like, “I’ve got another couple of decades to figure it out.” If I’m lucky.

WITH THE DIRTY PROJECTORS AT
LE NATIONAL ON SUNDAY,
NOV. 15, 8:30 P.M., $17