Bledsoe: Musical adventurer creates her own nanny diaries

Merrill Garbus, who records under the name tUnE-yArDs, began writing music because she needed songs for her puppet shows.

“BiRd-BrAINs,” the new album by Merrill Garbus, better known as tUnE-yArDs is about as far away from a commercial studio recording as you could find.

The album is filled with odd found sounds, children’s voices and Garbus’ ukulele tunes and was recorded on a digital voice recorder. Low-fi? Definitely. But that doesn’t discount that “BiRd-BrAINs” is a fun listen, and don’t suspect that Garbus’ primitive take was anything but intentional.

“From the moment I started doing anything artistic,” says Garbus, “I’ve always known it felt better for me to not squeeze my music into whatever was the status quo. I’ve gotten plenty of negative reviews because of the quality of the recording. Anyone who wants to only hear clean studio sounds, that’s fine, but it would make me feel less alive than I do to work that way. ... A lot of people react to the fun and the life in the recording and, to me, that’s all about the mistakes.”

Mistakes might be the wrong word. Garbus seems to simply seems to have a good sense of serendipity.

“I was working as a nanny, but I knew I didn’t want to be a nanny for the rest of my life — as wonderful as the kid was,” says Garbus. It was actually two children, but the older was in elementary school and Garbus spent most of her time with a little boy who was 2½ by the time Garbus began working on what would become “BiRd-BrAINs.”

“I started to think like a 2 ½ year old,” says Garbus. “They’re so curious about everything and I’ve always been mildly obsessed with children’s songs and stories.”

Oddly, when Garbus created a puppet show after graduating from college, it wasn’t a show aimed at children. Her shows at parks met with some mixed audience reviews.

“It really wasn’t meant for children,” says Garbus. “It was about a woman selling her child to the butcher. The mothers were horrified and were pulling their children away from it. But the children were all cheering because the child starts chasing the butcher.”

It was for that production that Garbus first began writing songs.

“My parents were both musicians and although I had been studying theater I was very interested in music,” she says. “But that turned into me just capturing sounds all around me. My generation is very rhythm-driven. Hip-hop music is what really affected my generation a lot. So what I turned to was creating rhythm out of captured sounds.”

She was also writing tunes on the ukulele and eventually she began to merge the two — recording the album on that little digital recorder.

Although Garbus’ music is available through the 4AD label, she says she hasn’t been too worried about downloading and such. She found out when she offered an earlier album for free download that “people actually wanted to pay me for it.”

“I think music should be available. If they can’t afford it, I’d much rather they be able to have it. I hope I’ll always be able to give music away.”

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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