Something strange and beautiful happens around four minutes into Tune-Yards’ 2011 Tiny Desk Concert—released a few months ahead of the Oakland band’s acclaimed sophomore album, w h o k i l l—in which bandleader Merrill Garbus and company start hopping up and down at the exact same time in an ecstatic, spring-loaded frenzy.
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One decade, several albums, and one Boots Riley film score later, Tune-Yards are still spreading that joyful, jittery energy through their music and performances. You can hear that quality in their new album, sketchy.—out March 26 via 4AD—but the album also contains Garbus’s most confrontational lyrics to date as she calls on white folks, including herself, to embrace anti-racism. If Tune-Yards’ 2018 album I can feel you creep into my private life found Garbus examining her own complicity in systems of oppression—specifically white supremacy—then sketchy. finds Garbus asking others to do the same.
“Thinking ‘bout your money / think about the homes you wreck,” Garbus sings in a jarring, synth-driven anti-gentrification number called “homewrecker.” Later, in “silence pt. 1 (when we say ‘we’),” Garbus invokes a famous Grace Lee Boggs quote that seems to animate the album: “She said ‘change yourself to change the world,’ and I’m gonna try.”
“For me, a big thing is welcoming accountability,” Garbus recently told American Songwriter over the phone. “[The album closer] ‘be not afraid.’ is really saying to someone else, ‘Please give it to me straight—don’t spare me.’ That’s what I wanted to end on, a feeling of invitation, and that’s both in the context of anti-racist work but also generationally harkening back to the ‘hold yourself.’ song and those themes.”
Garbus and her partner and collaborator Nate Brenner spoke to American Songwriter from their home in Oakland about crafting their new album, listening closely to Kendrick Lamar and adrienne maree brown, and learning to value confusion. Check out the full interview and watch Tune-Yards’ recent music videos and late night performances below.
American Songwriter: Around the release of your last album, you told an interviewer that “I probably ask myself every single day what the fuck I’m doing,” adding, “More specifically: How do I de-center myself as a white musician, making room for artists of color and voices seldom heard in pop music, while also using the public voice I have to call my (mostly white) audiences into consciousness and action?” Do these questions extend to sketchy. as well?
Merrill Garbus: It’s all the same questions all the time. I would stand behind the same quote. The questions remain similar, and a new question might be, for me, “How do I keep the joy and celebration of life in the music that I am now finding is necessary to continue the work of living and asking difficult questions?”
AS: There is so much joy in these songs, but also so much anger and frustration and sadness. Do you find that particular emotions drive you toward creative expression?
Merrill: That’s a really good question. I think I’ve learned to not depend on any specific emotion to create, by which I mean I’ve learned that the discipline of showing up to the practice then allows for the emotions to come in and infiltrate. I used to depend on getting myself into a specific emotional state, which probably was… I want to say frustration, but it’s almost like a teenage frustration.
Nate Brenner: Angst?
Merrill: Angst! That’s the one. There are a lot of emotions—especially around race, especially when we’re talking about gentrification—that actually propel me away from creation, and the new practice is to stay in the practice of creation even as I’m experiencing those emotions. That’s been an interesting practice. The emotions that really tend to lead to shame and wanting to crawl under a rock—how do you stay there and write the words down and tease out the feelings and the textures and the sentiments? It turns out that music is really great for that.
AS: There’s this refrain in the lead single and album opener “nowhere, man”—people wanna hear you sing. Is that a sample, or did you record that yourself?
Merrill: It’s a sample of a song that we never used for the last record, so we sampled ourselves.
AS: Is that line addressed to yourself or others or both?
Merrill: I want to ask you the same question! [laughing] The thing I love about sampling, and the thing I love about music production, is that you can let a phrase ask a question. You can re-contextualize a phrase so that it doesn’t have that literal meaning. In that case—“people wanna hear you sing”—it was very, “come on, you should sing!” I just had enough doubt about that. Maybe people don’t want to hear me sing or you sing, [so] how do you use the CDJ to loop that and warp it enough so that it doesn’t feel so true anymore, so that it feels more multi-dimensional?
AS: Nate, did you want to add anything about what emotions animate these songs for you?
Nate Brenner: I don’t even want to bring it up but [after] the 2016 election—I won’t even say his name—it felt like I had to learn how to create music without rage, because I was so mad after that. This album we were working on for a couple years and it was kind of like, just trying to have optimism and hope and also at the same time almost expect that the same result would happen in the upcoming [2020] election. I didn’t want to just make this angry-sounding music, but I was having a lot of anger from the situation we were in.
AS: Is there any music y’all have turned to over the last few years to access that joy or optimism?
Nate: I remember that Kendrick Lamar [song “Alright”], like “we’re gonna be alright,” that kind of sentiment where it’s gonna be okay.
Merrill: I was gonna say it feels confusing to me because a lot of the songs of hope are actually speaking to Black folks and people of color, so it really feels confusing to say “we get so much from Black music” right now. My first thought is Miriam Makeba. Hugh Masekela. Music from places where people endured essentially genocide and continue to make music that is a celebration of life. And again, it just feels really confusing to also have access to that music as white musicians, like, “Oh thanks, that helps me too.” Then, at the same time, allowing that to propel us [toward], “Okay, Kendrick is speaking these words and I’m going to listen to all of his words and I’m going to feel called in, and here are the actions that I’m going to take as respect, actually, like respecting his work.”
AS: What are some of the ways you echo other voices that matter to you or move you in this album?
Merrill: I felt very influenced by adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown who have this podcast called “How to Survive the End of the World.” Grace Lee Boggs, who is referenced in the song “silence pt. 1,” I had watched a documentary about her years ago and my grandparents were real labor-union-rights-Pete-Seeger devotees, and she really reminded me of my grandparents’ spirit, but put into action. I think they were more talk than action in how they lived their lives in that regard.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is another author I found out about through the Brown sisters’ podcast. [These folks are] people who are both realistic about the limitations of humans—often privileged humans—and at the same time very generous in considering how we move forward together and what skills we need in order to do that.
There’s an annoying tone of hopelessness by people who have so much, which sometimes I’m like, “How dare we be hopeless?” when we basically have no existential worries, other than the entire planet collapsing. I find that it’s difficult to maintain perspective for most people—to both be in reality, like we’re okay right now and we have agency to make change that is going to and needs to benefit others as well. I find that those are the voices that I want to listen to…
The problem with quoting that [Grace Lee Boggs quote] out of context is that she really means it. It’s hard to transform oneself. It’s really, really difficult to change stuff that is deeply ingrained in us. And so the challenge actually feels as heavy as changing the world, to really change those things internally.
AS: You’ve now been doing that work in a very public way for some time. I know you’ve voiced some confusion about your role as a white person using your voice in this way. Do you ever find that confusion is a productive site for you?
Merrill: Just recently, and I would say in the press for the last record it felt really difficult. A friend of mine who’s in one of my white [anti-racist] affinity groups was like, “I’m really glad you did that interview, and it sounds like the language is pretty new for you,” and I was like, “Yeah, that’s what it feels like.”
It’s only really recently that I’ve been invited into the challenge of “Can you feel energized by the confusion?” Like, can you feel energized by, for instance, someone calling you out or calling you in? Could you even feel pleasure in someone challenging you around your whiteness and your white privilege? Could you feel like actually that’s an invitation of love, in a way—that it takes someone who loves you more to really engage you in that way than someone who will just say “fuck you” and write you off? [It’s] really recently that even the possibility of that feels in the air.
AS: Who are some of the folks you worked with to bring these songs to life? Did the pandemic shape those collaborations?
Nate: We recorded the album pre-Covid, and we were about to fly to upstate New York to mix the album in April [2020], then Covid happened and we just decided to mix it remotely, so [the pandemic] didn’t affect a lot creatively. I guess the biggest difference was that the sax player recorded himself. He was gonna meet us in upstate New York to record the final sax parts but he did it on a little Zoom recorder.
Merrill: [He recorded] in the wine shop where he works, after hours. I think that was the only thing that was recorded after we couldn’t be in the same spaces any more. So Hamir Atwal came to our space in downtown Oakland and did drums, Rob Ewing also recorded down there. This was the first time that we recorded everything on our own in our own space, having invested in gear over the years. So we had this more luxurious time to write, not under the gun of time or expensive studios.
AS: I want to ask about the album closer, “be not afraid.” What does it mean to end there, with that song?
Merrill: Where did that first drum loop come from?
Nate: That 808 through the distortion pedal.
Merrill: Right, right. I’m bringing up the drum machine because I think a lot of the themes or feelings of songs came from the production point of view, which is a way that we write—even sometimes more than I want to because it means sitting in front of a computer a lot. But that drum loop just felt so heavy and also supportive at the same time. It felt like with this drum loop we can propel ourselves through an entire song, like whatever happens, it will work out. To me it felt like it was an anthem. It needed some type of anthemic chorus.
I guess bringing up Kendrick is a good point because, as a white musician now, I’m like, “What do we rally around?” And I’m saying “we” as in white people. What do progressive white people need to hear right now in order to do our anti-racist work? For me, a big thing is welcoming accountability. “be not afraid.” is really saying to someone else, “Please give it to me straight—don’t spare me.” That’s what I wanted to end on, a feeling of invitation, and that’s both in the context of anti-racist work but also generationally harkening back to the ‘hold yourself.’ song and those themes.
I worry that my parents are hurt when I’m like, “You guys really fucked up, meaning your generation,” and I don’t want to be that kind of old person. I want to be like, “Let me hear your grief about what we weren’t able to pass down to you and let’s talk about it.” That was a sentiment I feel like I haven’t heard. How do you make an anthem and say, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” How do you make an anthem that says, “Don’t follow me, but let’s go together. Take my hand, but don’t be nice.”
AS: Is there anything else y’all want to share?
Nate: This is the first time that we’re releasing an album and not gearing up to tour, and it feels really good to just let the music speak for itself—the recorded version—and not feel like we have to start flying around the world and getting in a van to promote it.
Merrill: It feels really vulnerable, I think, to be releasing music again. But I think there’s music on this album that has been helping me through this time, so I hope that it helps other people. sketchy. is out March 26 via 4AD. You can pre-order it and pre-save it here.
Photos by Pooneh Ghana
