But that’s only part of the appeal in Garbus’s confrontational, beat-laden music, something delivered in a similarly raw live performance. She has learned to control these necessary exposures and infuse them with a very individual sense of survival.
“It’s scary, it’s really scary,” Garbus accepts of her writing, and sharing parts of herself with the public. “I think I am so dedicated to being honest about my conscience and about who I am as a person. Even to… I mean I’ve had people recommend to me that I not be so honest.
“It’s different when I get up on stage,” she explains. “I don’t feel fear because that’s Merrill the performer and I have my performance mask on and I still have choice to who I let into my life. But when I talk about the music, and certainly what the songs say within them, I don’t want to care about what people think because it’s not all truth, a lot of it is just based on my experience and people can think what they want beyond that.”
The subject matter of w h o k i l l is not simple, nor is the lady that writes it – but that’s another beguiling element to Tune-Yards.
“They’re tender subjects, they feel very vulnerable, and I can only hope that in talking about them other people feel safe. Talking about them as well, I think a lot of them are human conditions.”
This sense of vulnerability is something that permeates Garbus the woman, made more clear when we speak of her transformation for performance; the application of banshee face paint is just a pointer to the person who walks on stage.
“The face paint has become part of the ritual of it and I do kind of need that to say ‘OK, now you’re transitioning into this space. Now you’re going from real life to stage life,’ and I have to have a separation between those two in order to survive my life.”
Ending most comments with a soft giggle, Garbus explains that this process of survival when performing such ‘battle music’ is something developed over time, stemming from her time in college at Smith – a progressive women’s art school in Massachusetts – when she was 20, and the crippling self-doubt and depression that plagued her.
“I remember being in Waiting For Godot sometime when I was in school and I was deeply depressed at that time, that specific year of my life I was deeply depressed, partially because every night I would be saying ‘I can’t go on’, ‘I must go on’, ‘I can’t go on’… it was very dark.
“I’m 32 now, and when I look back at when I was 20 I think, ‘Oh my gosh, how did I ever make it through!’ Those dark times of figuring out who I was as an adult and how I was gonna deal with the problems of the world, and was I gonna save the world, or did I wanna be in the world? [ giggles] It was a very fitting theme to do Waiting For Godot at that point in my life.”
Merrill Garbus now looks back at this time with a sense of perspective only age can afford, and working from such defeating depression to creating something that is delivered in as much a sense of celebration as confrontation, is something uniquely her own. It is, in a sense, battle music.
“What fuels my creativity is stuff that’s wrong, a lot of the time. Stuff that I feel needs to be changed, whether in myself, or the world, or both. So at the same time I feel my music is a celebration of life, and sometimes I feel sort of cheesy saying that, but I have come to understand that when we all come together for these concerts, when people come together for a performance, we’re all there to celebrate being alive in some way: to dance, or to sing along, or to let the music hit you in some way that nothing else can. I know I am there for that reason, and it’s a life-affirming experience, let’s put it that way.
“I think that regardless of the fact there are problems with me and with the world, my sense has always been, ‘Yes, but that is what life is about.’ If you didn’t have challenges in life you’d just sit back and take it all for granted. I think it’s resistance and revolution in action and in thought, but also giving into the fact that we’re alive right then, right there.”
As sufferers of depression would know it’s very rare for the beast to exit entirely, and while we all have our own coping mechanisms, Garbus is pragmatic in her approach.
“Making sure that I’m sane with myself, listening to what’s going on with me, and honestly when I started yelling louder [giggles ] and singing louder, it really helped with my depression ’cause I was no longer unable to express my feelings. And I think a lot of my depression stems from that, having so much inside of me that I felt I couldn’t get out.”
Well, it’s out now, and w h o k i l l delivers that voice like a punch to your brain – and heart.
