Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner are tUnE-yArDs, an indie pop band rooted in drum loops and other sounds of world music. Their quick ascent has seen the band leap from the Bottletree on their last visit in 2011 to Iron City in 2015.
Garbus spoke to Weld before the stop, chatting about her standards for licensing, women in music and her thoughts on the closure of Bottletree, a venue she publicly praised in the past.
Weld: The band remains you and Nate Brenner, but you’ll bring more band members to Birmingham. Does the band remain a duo in studio or do you record with more people than that?
Merrill Garbus: That’s a good question. We definitely have more people involved so we’ll bring in people for a day or two at a time. But we are defining tUnE-yArDs as being Nate and myself. Project by project, album by album, we will bring in other people for the live band.
Weld: And that band keeps getting bigger and bigger. Is there a cap on that? Or is it limitless?
MG: I try to keep it open. When I named the band tUnE-yArDs instead of Merrill Garbus, that was partially so that I could keep my options open at all times. So I refuse to commit. I would like to serve the music most of all. If we create a small, electronic album that just needs me on a laptop — I can’t imagine that would be so — but, maybe the tour will shrink again. And I would love to have an orchestra someday, if it was fitting for the music.
A lot of people don’t consider the financial implications of touring with such a big group of people. And we are very choosy about the licensing that we do. I don’t lend tUnE-yArDs music to companies that I don’t believe in. We turn down a lot of the money that I think some bigger bands take in order to afford touring with such a huge party. These are all things that I have to consider in the running-the-business side of tUnE-yArDs — sometimes it’s musical considerations, but sometimes it’s “What can we afford right now?”
Weld: You mention that you refuse to lend your music to companies that you don’t believe in. Who are some of those companies and what are those standards that you hold them to?
MG: I feel way more comfortable having our music in someone else’s piece of art. I’ll much more readily say yes to having a tUnE-yArDs song in a TV show or in a movie than I would a car commercial. Or anything that is environmentally straining. Cars and oil or clothing companies that can’t say that they don’t use really horrible labor practices in other parts of the world. I try not to lend the music to people that I believe are doing great damage in the world. It’s really hard to get around.
The latest commercial that we did was for Sonos, a company that does wireless speakers, a company that really values music as a very important part of our daily lives. They are as green of a company as anyone you will find that manufactures things. We assessed them as a company, and I didn’t feel comfortable lending “Water Fountain” to very many things — there’s a lot in that song that means a lot to me. But we decided that we would start a charitable fund called The Water Fountain using the money that we got from that.
It’s always a tough dialogue about how I feel okay about using our music to sell products. That’s a tough thing for me. But I felt that the ad was really beautiful, and I feel like we are doing great things with that money. So in that situation, it felt like the right thing to do.
Weld: You once said, “There aren’t a lot of rad women being loud.” Since then mainstream pop music has been dominated by women. Is it an improvement? Are we heading in the right direction?
MG: I think it’s heading in the right direction, but a couple of things have come to my attention: there’s a lot of female presence in mainstream music right now, but there is a lot of insidious sexism when you see a woman that is a big time star. There’s women and then there’s women being famous at what men want them to be. I just think that we always need to watch ourselves and watch our culture and watch what we do to young women that are trying to grow into adult women and giving them different alternatives of what they can be.
When you see Rihanna or Nicki Minaj or Miley Cyrus — those are options. They are supposedly empowered women. But a lot of their power comes from how they are very appealing to a male gaze. And how they work that system. I don’t think it’s easy for people to digest more difficult images of women. I got some flak for my facial hair. And I was tweeting about the women involved in tUnE-yArDs [recently] and I got some backlash: “Why aren’t you featuring men?” In this day and age do we really need to feature men?
I think we need to look at how many people you see in the music industry — there’s still, in terms of gigging musicians, and sound engineers and producers — how many of those are women? We still need to be balancing that out more.
Weld: You have graduated from there and you’re playing a much larger venue now, but a venue you’ve said a lot of nice things about, Bottletree, has closed.
MG: Noooooo! Why?
Weld: It’s been sold. What did that venue mean to you? What can you share about your experience at Bottletree?
MG: Well, it was wonderful. I have family in Birmingham and that was the first time that my uncle had seen us play. It was the first time that I got to see some of my cousins. I’ve not spent much time in Alabama. I’ve spent time in other parts of the South.
We did a show with Pat Jordache that that night. And that’s my old bandmate that lives up in Montreal. So, yes, I have incredibly fond memories there. I’ve also heard tales that some bands, no matter how large they are, will demand they play the Bottletree because of their positive experiences there. Food’s good — what else can I say? I’m so disappointed to hear that. Shoot.
Weld: You stylize your band name and album titles very deliberately with the capitalization. Why is that?
MG: It all came from MySpace, if you can remember the days of MySpace. That was the first time that I was able to share my music on the Internet. I was trying to be visually captivating. I’m a visual person and it’s always been important to have the visuals associated with the music feel like a part of the whole world of tUnE-yArDs. And I don’t know — it just looked better. On the little icon on MySpace, it looked better to have my name be something visually special. And I also, I don’t know, I wanted to be a crick in the neck of journalists like you. [Laughs]
Honestly, now I don’t care. “What are you going to do, person writing about my band? Are you going to do this crazy capitalization thing that makes you slightly angry for pushing the shift key back and forth and taking valuable seconds out of your day? Or are you going to make the choice to just capitalize it normally and be bold?” It was a way of engaging and pissing people off.
tUnE-yArDs comes to Iron City on Tuesday, April 7. Doors open at 7:00 p.m., while the show begins at 8:00 p.m. Son Lux opens. Tickets are $21. For more information, visit IronCityBham.com.
