Tune-Yards Interview- Dark Side of the Tune

By late 2011 Merrill Garbus was truly, madly, deeply fed up with Tune-Yards: the music, the kooky warpaint, the clever-raunchy lyrics. The problem is that Garbus essentially is Tune-Yards – writer of the songs, channeler of the band's aggressively unconventional vision. She was, moreover, contractually obligated to deliver a new album to her record company. Merrill flashes a strained grin: it was a difficult time. "I got sick of myself," she nods. "I'd been touring a lot and wanted to try something different."

Ideally, she would have put the project  – clattering fem-pop in which melody and rhythm wrestle one another to the floor – on hiatus. However, legal documents had been signed, that next LP was due (overdue, in fact). Like it or not Tune-Yards would have to continue.
"I'd never been in that position before – to be contractually obliged to do something… I mean, wow," says Garbus, a former street performer who took up music to escape her cloistered middle-class upbringing . "You think, 'Jeez, I wish I didn't have to make an album'. And you do have to make an album. There is a mini-industry around Tune-Yards having a new record out."
She could have simply churned out a rehash of 2010's breakthough whokill – a dazzling groin-kick of an LP, at once muscular and seductive. That would have been the easy route, the road Garbus has never once taken in her life. So instead, she threw away the roadmap and completely reinvented what Tune-Yards represents.
The result is Nikki Nack , a brain-warping blend of confrontational dance, fucked-up bluegrass and machine-processed power ballads (yes). It's quite unlike anything Tune-Yards fans have heard before – for that matter,  quite unlike anything anyone has heard before .
"Looking back it seems easy now because everyone has been so positive," says Garbus. "In fact, it was a struggle. I was starting with a blank slate. The reason I got through it is I'm good with deadlines. The fact other people were counting on me pushed me on. I did very well in school - having a timer clicking in the background brings out something in me. For sure, there was pressure. A lot of jobs were on the line. I had to work hard to get away from that, to free my mind."
Her solution was to leave her adopted home of Oakland, California – the strange, teeming place across the bay from San Francisco where tourists fear to tread – and temporarily relocate to Haiti. She went hoping to work with other musicians. Instead she received a lesson in perspective. In Haiti, people lacked running water, regular access to food. And she was worried about a new Tune-Yards record? Did first world problems come any first worldlier?
"Coming from the US, I was shocked by the hunger everywhere. I spent some time in Africa and sure there was poverty, but nothing like what I saw in Haiti. In Kenya I didn't see anyone who was actually hungry on a day to day basis. In Haiti there were people getting one meal a day. It made me realise how lucky I am. I met musicians far more accomplished than me  – and they were just getting by. I'm so lucky to be in the position I am. That was the lesson I took away."
Garbus seems acutely sensitive to her privileged origins. She grew up in well-heeled Connecticut and has been making up for it ever since. There was her early stint as a street performer, followed by her spell in Kenya. Nowadays, she is proud to live in Oakland, a city many Americans are inclined to write off as an urban wasteland (it was wracked by anti-police riots in 2010).
"The edges are taken off so many places in America," she says. "Let's get real - the edges are taken off Oakland too. A friend of mine, who is American, recently returned home from Berlin where she lived. She walked into one of those Whole Foods stores and was like, 'This is insane - there are so many options. Does anyone really need this many choices?' Oakland is a little edgier. But it has a Whole Foods too. And I go there lots."

Nikki Nack is out now.