On ‘Heartbreak’, the opening track on Tune-Yards‘ new album Better Dreaming, Merrill Garbus sings about surviving not just in spite of, but within, times of horror and disintegration. It is a persistent theme on Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner’s first album since 2021’s sketchy., even as the mood and pace of its expression varies: “For a child raised under unbreathable skies,” she sings mournfully on the sparser ‘Get Through’, “I want so much more than just getting by.” More direct and rapturous than you’d expect given the weight of its subject matter, Better Dreaming is as strongly animated by the desire for motion as it is steadfast in its vulnerability, letting it creep through both slower and more vibrant moments on the record. In introspection as well as in dance, it never moves without liberatory purpose. Not knowing how is kind of the reason.
We caught up with Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus to talk about Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo, toddlers, the YMCA, and other inspirations behind their new album.
Boots Riley’s miniseries I’m a Virgo
Was there any overlap between working on the soundtrack and Better Dreaming?
I only know because I was looking at pictures the other day – it was right as we completed it. I think we finished around February 2023, and my first demo was in April of that year. So it was all-encompassing – there wasn’t much overlap. We deposited so much creative material into that show, and then I needed a slight respite before going into the studio in a disciplined way for the Tune-Yards stuff. But it was certainly coming out of that world. The world of Boots, when we’re creating something, is really clear in his practice about the importance of culture, and that his life energy has been devoted to art and culture, whether as a rapper and writer in The Coup or in his film career. Seeing someone so devoted – he does a ton of other stuff, speaking at rallies and marches, on social media critiquing the Democratic party— but when he’s in a film or TV show, he’s all in on that. Everything in him wants originality, to see what hasn’t been seen before. I think that’s why we’ve felt a kinship with him, and he feels a kinship with us. We’ve never had an interest in trying to sound like someone else or the status quo – I’ve been interested in using pop forms to push the envelope a bit. He never tries to be anybody else. That was a super inspiring energy to take from that project and be eager to challenge ourselves to be that original and believe in ourselves that much.
Although you needed that space between projects, how did you feel like you were feeding off that energy?
It’s such a blur. At that time, we also had a one-and-a-half-year-old. We were in the midst of parenting a small child. I think there was a sense of accomplishment; we wrote so much music – it’s seven episodes that are chock-full of music, and we probably wrote 30-40% more that got discarded – just the volume was so great. There was a bit of exhaustion from that, but we’d proven we could write that quickly without quality suffering. Nate and I have spent so much time rehashing the same music. But we were in a flow of knowing what the world of the music is, and when we’re in that flow state with knowing the world, there’s a good probability that what comes out of us in that phase will be the right thing. I needed some kind of rest, but I also think we were in that practice of showing up to the studio and just getting on with it.
There’s one line in the trailer: “I’m not from a desolate place. I’m from Oakland.” To which the response, of course, is, “Yes, a desolate place.”
When I was making this inspirations list, I almost just said “Oakland.” Because Oakland has been such a huge part of Tune-Yards’ DNA, as filtered through my presence here. It’s a difficult place to live and thrive in sometimes, depending on who you are. But there’s a reason so many people come here, stay here, thrive here. I think that line is a perfect encapsulation of the outward look on Oakland – like, “How could you live with the things you see on the nightly news?” But it’s not the reality of the place, even if it’s a tiny fraction.
I love Boots’ work because he encapsulates huge ideas in two lines, two characters. It feels so true, even in trying to explain to our families why we live here, why we invest in this place as our home. I think about it daily, because every day I ride my bike from home to the studio, and I see everything. The sunshine in Oakland is so intense. It’s like the beauty of the place is so much in your face, and with that, you see the worst of humanity’s problems. Why I’m here is because I feel like I’m living in the reality of the planet, not in some secluded fantasy, and with that comes these immense, rich rewards of life, of community, of culture, of true diversity, a true “this is what happens when you stick people from around the world in a big mess.” [laughs] It’s beautiful.
Canadian astrologer and activist Chani Nicholas
In what ways have you engaged with her work?
It can be a very short answer, which is that I consult with her. [laughs] I mean, not personally, but in the past seven or eight years that I’ve been in this ritual of consulting astrology, I think Chani was the first person that linked my need for wonder in my life with the reality of what’s actually happening down here on Earth. I’ve been in dialogue with myself a lot about hope and what hope is, and it feels like there’s a lot of dialogue around hope and hopelessness lately. For me, I’m distilling it down to: hope is actually not the most useful thing to me right now, but wonder is – mystery, the sense that I don’t know so much, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s a sense that we are seeing down the road and we’re seeing what’s going to happen and it looks horrible, and I think, to cultivate this sense of wonder in myself has been really important.
Chani is a part of my practice of wonder, of, “Well, what if the planets today are actually saying next week there’s gonna be this huge hope-builder in your life. There’s gonna be a huge opportunity for you?” And then I can go, “Within hopelessness, we’re still moving forward, and there’s gonna be an opportunity ahead.” So then I’m curious, what could that be? What can my life be as a musician, as a 46-year-old person in this world? What is there for me? And it gets me out of this daily oppression of reality. And she herself, I think, would say it’s not about whether it’s real. It’s not about whether astrology is factual and real. It’s a spiritual practice, is how I access it.
Scholar, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs
How has she kind of informed the way you think and write about hope?
I was gonna say, that’s a good segue around hope and hopelessness to her work. I read her books in these fractions – she has this book called M Archive and I read the beginning of it, and I was like, Woah… Wait.” [laughs] I had to stop because I felt like she was she had opened up this part of consciousness for me that I couldn’t rush through the work. I had to stop and let it resonate with me; I needed to have more space inside of myself to receive her teaching, is how I felt about it. She is a scholar of Audre Lorde, and what I want to highlight is Audre Lorde’s poem ‘A Litany for Survival’ – at the end of it, it says: “When we speak we are afraid/ our words will not be heard/ nor welcomed/ but when we are silent/ we re still afraid/ So it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never meant to survive.”
I feel that black feminists never get mainstream legitimacy from white patriarchal culture – obviously, that’s kind of built in, but we should be centering black feminist voices, and it’s for this reason. We’re hearing from people who are saying we were never meant to survive, and yet here we are. From a species point of view – and I’m speaking to you from inside the United States and inside of growing fascist power – there are so many ways where we are not actually meant to survive and thrive in this system. And that these forces are actually counting on us not thriving in order for them, for the very few to survive. For me, that’s where the lesson is: let us hear from voices who were not meant to survive, and here they are surviving and speaking. That’s where the clarity of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ work is for me is, in the singularity of her voice. I’ve never heard anyone write the way that she writes. I’ve never heard anyone synthesize reality as it is in the way that she does, to take a present – to go like, “Here is actually where we are right now.” I would say that is hope from hopelessness: we are not meant to survive, is hopeless, and yet we survive, is hope.
When you hear her speak or when you read her writing, she’s a joyful, beautiful human being. In the song ‘Limelight’, there was for me was a real need to push out of my this – I can feel it as I talk – hopelessness. And on top of that, I’m white, and on top of that, I’m married to a cis man – all these things where I feel like I don’t have permission to speak. I think there’s this need for those of us who feel not only depressed about the present, but also implicated in it – which is all of us, really, as humans decimating the world – that I think we also need to go like, “And I’m still just gonna be here, a joyful human being.” Because this is a call to be alive, really, to feel alive in all of ourselves. So when I hear these Black feminist writers, Alexis Pauline Gumbs being one of the foremost for me, I hear them also being like, “Look at us live. Look at us alive.” And that’s the energy I feel like was a real inspiration for me in this record.
Toddlers
Your child is obviously featured on ‘Limelight’, but before we talk about that song, I’m curious how you became conscious of their presence shaping the record in a broader way.
That’s a good question. Certainly, being in the world of a toddler was just the water that we were swimming in. We did this whole process where we worked on the record from, say, April to December, and then we felt like we had enough to go mix, and then we mixed some tracks and eventually tore those all back apart, tore them into stems, rearranged them, edited them, and chopped them all up. But for that first mixing session, our kid had just turned two, so it was really just like, “Here we are in two-year-old land.” I could do a sixty-minute podcast on, like, the world of a toddler and how it will shatter your life [laughs] – they call three-year-olds now “threenagers,” like teenagers and three-year-olds. And I think there’s a sense of that passion and that spirit and that moodiness and that intolerance for anything that doesn’t fit into the world of the toddler – there’s something so dynamic about living with that.
It’s really full-on. I feel like I have to engage fully. I can’t be on my phone. I can’t numb out with things that I used to just numb out with. I feel the call to be present and to be a pillar of stability for someone who is going through all these immense changes and dynamism. Honestly, it’s highs and lows. Some days are so, “Oh my gosh, check this out. Look at all these new skills that our kid has,” just the most beautiful smiles and music and playing a little toy guitar, all these things that are such joy. And then there’s just myself at my most desperate — I haven’t slept more than four hours, and the kid is just screaming in my face in the middle of the night, and meeting myself in those places of desperation.
The line that we’ve been saying, also, is that it takes so much time. It just is a lot of time that you need to spend. People tell me that, you know, seven, eight, nine, your kid is spending more time on their own and you have more time to yourself. And really, we did not have a lot of time to ourselves. So going to the studio was like, “Let’s get in, let’s do as much as possible in a concentrated amount of time, and then let’s get out.” That very pragmatic sense of not having time was part of the “ease” of things coming out – we didn’t have that much time for them to come out.
Is that you deciphering your toddler’s feedback at the end of ‘Limelight’?
Technically, he was speaking into the microphone but didn’t have the headphones on, so he said, “Not working.” He was expecting to hear music, and there was no music, and he was trying to figure out the technicality of where it’s not coming from. But that’s what I liked about it, is that it does sound like a full-on critique. Like, “You messed up the song. It’s not working.” So much is not working.
Right. Maybe not even about the song, just absorbing all the social commentary.
[laughs] Exactly.
I feel like that dynamism is expressed in the duality between the hope and togetherness of ‘Limelight’ and the introspection of the title track, where it sounds like you are meeting yourself in those moments of desperation. Although it’s a subtler song, there’s a lot of defiance in it that makes it feel important enough to have it be the album title.
I feel like when we settled on the title for the record, what felt good is that we knew that that probably wouldn’t be the most highlighted track in this age of singles, but it felt like it gave that song a chance to be heard more because it did really feel like a core of the soul of the record. I feel like it’s one of our best songs as a band, and it doesn’t fit into a Tune-Yards song. I feel like when people think of us, I assume that they would think of ‘Bizness’ or ‘Water Fountain’. These songs that are pretty high-energy and danceable and the sense of “Let’s talk about the difficult things in the world, but let’s dance while we do it.” ‘Better Dreaming’ as a song just feels like a really different mood, but it felt like we could use all of these tools that we’ve learned over the years to write a beautiful, heartbreaking song, I hope.
The thing I love about songwriting and recording and production is that you can match the writing of a song with a sonic environment that brings it to this next level of illumination. I felt like in ‘Better Dreaming’, we were able to combine this lyrical content of the song and the chords of the song and the structure of the song with this insane world of sound that really felt like it evoked what the words were trying to say.
The YMCA
I’m sure that’s a more day-to-day inspiration.
The reason I felt confident putting it on there is because, I mean, yes – in fact, after I get off this call with you, I’ll deal with my kid for a second, and then I’m gonna go to the YMCA. I think I heard John Congleton talk about on a podcast [LaunchLeft] about this, but there’s this sense of, the musicians who really stand the test of time and are working into later in their lives – there’s a blue-collar-ness of the work that you need to show up. And the YMCA is a way that Nate and I both are able to show up for the work. We need to get our bodies in shape for the work ahead, and there’s something about it that really lent itself to the pragmatic nature of routine. Maybe in my early twenties, I would be like, “What I really need to do to write a song is I’m gonna go to the store, get a big bar of chocolate, a bottle of wine, and borrow some cigarettes from my friend because I can’t afford them myself.” That’s the scenario – that’s what’s gonna let all of my grief and wondering and angst come out of me into a song. And the 46-year-old version of that is, “No, actually, what’s gonna help a song come out is showing up for work every single day.”
And in order to show up for work every single day consistently, I need to take care of myself. And honestly, physiologically too, I had a lot of strength rebuilding to do after pregnancy. Your body goes, “Woo,” and then you really, as a singer, need to bring it back in so that the power is right there. That has been a huge part of reinvesting in myself that way. The YMCA is multicultural, multigenerational – it’s this great equalizer. It’s all kinds of bodies, all kinds of disabilities and abilities, all kinds of purposes. It’s really different in that way than other gyms, I think. Of course, it’s flawed like any institution, but it’s probably the place where I’ve felt the most community continuity in the past few years.
The Questlove Supreme podcast
I think you previously cited Queslove’s book Creative Quest as an inspiration for sketchy.. Did that lead to becoming a regular listener of the podcast?
As soon as it became available – it was through Pandora at first – I was right on it. It’s basically an insomnia companion to me, but also while nursing — I was nursing my kid through the night in the wee hours, and that was torment, except I’d be like, “I’ll be up from 3am to 4am, but I’m gonna be able to listen to this interview with–” it’s basically with everybody, so many of our musical influences. To me, Questlove is essentially an archivist in a lot of ways. Of course, he’s also one of my favorite drummers in the world and so talented and does all these other things. Especially as someone who is in relationship with my understanding of my influences and how I interact with them, it feels really important to have the artists themselves speak for themselves. In that podcast, i’s just a family. It’s the Questlove Supreme family, and to hear a family come in and celebrate these artists they’ve loved is really special. And what an archive – he’s essentially creating this priceless archive of hearing firsthand accounts of people’s own versions of their stories of coming up as musicians, writers, producers.
What do you get out of listening to conversations between artists you admire in that context as opposed to your day-to-day life?
It’s a way for me to, even when I’m in the most day-to-day minutiae of my life, dip into the realities of life as an artist. Hearing you ask that question, I realize how often I’m listening to podcasts about creative people, because I wanna know – I wake up every day and I’m like, “What am I doing? What is this job? Am I up for it?” I have so much questioning. I think also a lot of artists are self-doubting and self-deprecating, and so much art is made out of that questioning of why we’re here. And when I hear other creative people talk about — they don’t need to philosophize about why they’re here, but just hearing, you know, how Bobby McFerrin prepared his voice to be able to do what he did and does, which is one of my favorite episodes of that podcast. Hearing, “This drama happened with my record label, but here I am at 65 still talking about it and still performing.” To hear people’s stories of survival through what is a bullshit shitstorm, like so many people’s lives are – especially in this time of the internet and social media, where it can feel like one can be dismissed and trashed and canceled so easily – to hear people weathering those tides is really important.
Movement organizers
Maybe for too long, I was like, “Which am I gonna be? Do I wanna be part of this movement in this political way, or do I wanna be a musician?” And I feel like lately, I’ve just been like, “Hey, you’re a musician,” to myself, just trying to acknowledge that that’s the gift I was given in this lifetime. I’ve always been very aware of the work of movement organizers and the work of movement being so important to what I want my music to be supporting and in a relationship with. A song like ‘Swarm’ felt like it really came out in a way that was like, “What is music that fuels us? What is music that provides that fire underneath us to keep working with each other despite the forces of evil?” Just wanting to contribute to that in whatever way I can as a musician.
I remember a long time ago, when I lived in Montreal, I lived with an activist, and I remember asking him how I, as a musician, could support his work. He gave me this very specific answer that was like, “You can support this work that I’m doing.” I considered it, and I was like, “I’m so broke. I have no money to give.” And it’s been satisfying in some ways to work with this organization PLUS1 that adds a dollar onto every ticket that we sell, and then we just very quietly are raising money for organizations doing really great and important work in the world. This year, we’re mostly focusing on this organization Street Spirit, which is working with unhoused people in the Bay Area to publish a newspaper that’s all writing and art from unhoused people and letting their voices be the ones on top of this publication, and then unhoused people can sell that paper for their own income. Meanwhile, I hope, even if it in an energetic, felt sense, that people know the music there – that people who are doing this work, and even who are just identifying as queer folks, trans folks, people in marginalized communities, are hearing at least a space for themselves in our music.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Tune-Yards’ Better Dreaming is out now via 4AD.
