tUnE-yArDs Went to Haiti, and All We Got Was This Brilliant New Album


tUnE-yArDs videos have a distinctly childlike quality about them. They’re playful and bold, incorporating flamboyant colors, bouncing choreography, and wild costumes. Sometimes they’re full of actual children. Which makes sense, since Merrill Garbus, the creative force behind tUnE-yArDs, wrote some of the act’s first songs years ago while working as a nanny.

The video for “Water Fountain,” from Nikki Nack, her excellent new album on sale this week, borrows a page from Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which Garbus adores. “It was a dream come true,” she told me last week, speaking in an uncharacteristically subdued tone to save her voice for an upcoming world tour.

Holly Andres

What draws her to children’s art, Garbus says, is the juxtaposition of captivating colors and “very honest messages that can be really dark.” She possesses a certain innocence herself: On Nikki Nack, as on tUnE-yArDs’ past releases, her wailing lyrics are suffused with an exuberance and unabashed honesty that is unique to her sound. “Water Fountain,” Garbus says, “is about my anxiety over the collapse of our societal infrastructure and the lack of drinkable water. It’s a childlike chant, but the words are about heavy topics.”

In many ways, she sees Nikki Nack, named after a character she invented for the album, as a departure from her previous work. Her aim was to stray even further from Western music traditions than she already has. (Studying in Kenya as a Smith College student had a huge influence on her direction, she explained in an earlier chat with Mother Jones.)

After releasing her critically acclaimed 2011 album, whokill, Garbus spent almost two years studying syncopated rhythms—the new album’s original title was Sink-o—and taking drumming lessons with a Haitian dance and performance company in Oakland, California, where she lives. “I realized that most of the music I’m interested in is all syncopated,” she says.

She also spent two weeks in Haiti, where she witnessed Vodou rituals. The trip was a lesson in ancient percussive tradition, and a welcome reprieve from her growing fame. “I went to Haiti as a way to disorient myself from releasing a record and doing interviews, from the pressures of being in a band, and of image,” she told me. “That’s not what feeds me spiritually as a human being.”

The result was a “re-centering” and a “transformation in my understanding of rhythm and music,” not to mention a “rhythmically challenging album.” But Nikki Nack is more than just that. It’s also a document that shows how far she has come in her ability to maintain popular appeal while placing herself squarely outside of the mainstream. For that matter, Garbus says she doesn’t feel any pressure to cede to pop conventions for female performers—like a hypersexualized public persona. “That trivial bullshit will always be there,” she says. As long as people take her music seriously, she doesn’t care what else they think.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate