SHE BEGAN as a puppeteer and ukulele enthusiast, before turning to music and releasing her debut album on recycled cassette tape. Now she's singing about white privilege, intersectional feminism, and climate change.
Tune-Yards - the left-field indie-pop/electro vocalist and songwriter Merrill Garbus - released her fourth album, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, in January, plays the Róisín Dubh on Wednesday July 11. For this new album and tour, Tune-Yards is a duo, as it features Nate Brenner, who produced and co-wrote the album with Garbus.
While I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life tackles weighty issues like race, politics, feminism, and environmentalism, with the Trump presidency hovering in the background, the music is immediate, upbeat, and danceable. “Yes, the world is a mess," says Garbus, "but I’ve been attempting to look more and more inward: how do all of these 'isms' that we live in manifest in me, in my daily activities, interactions?"
There is also a noticeable 1980s feel to the new songs. “Some of the eighties throwback production came from wanting the vocals to sound robotic, maybe to counter the sincerity of the lyrics," says Garbus. "I started sampling my vocals with an MPC which I've wanted to do for years. There was something that felt really right about my voice being trapped in a machine.”
I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life is the follow-up to Tune-Yards 2014 album Nikki Nack (“life needs joyful noise like this" - Entertainment Weekly ). Inbetween, Garbus has collaborated with David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and Yoko Ono, as well as writing the song 'Action' for soul legend Mavis Staples.
Tickets are on sale from www.roisindubh.net, the Ticket Desk at OMG Zhivago, Shop Street, and The Róisín Dubh.
