~by Scott Pinkmountain

I recently had the pleasure of hosting Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner of Tune-Yards in my home and studio for ten days. They came down to the Mojave to get away from the busy-ness of their daily lives in order to focus on material for their next album. Oakland can be a great place to be around musicians and artists, to get stimulated and inspired, to take Haitian dance and drum lessons, but it can be a terrible place to do the kind of heavy lifting needed to write or finish new songs. They set up in my studio and worked with hardly any breaks and essentially no distractions, or none of the kind they’re used to at home. No cars dragging up the street, sirens wailing, social obligations.

After taking a half-day to settle in, Merril and Nate made up a scheduled regiment and kept it going until they were forced to break down their gear. Each morning, I’d cross paths with Merrill in the kitchen around 7:30, after she’d already been up a while, walking, sitting on a high boulder, writing, thinking, singing. Over breakfast, we’d talk about making things. Practice, touring, big ideas, niggling details, history, hopes, anxieties, pleasures and doubts. And again at dinner we’d all talk some more, having left them alone during the day, my one promise being I wouldn’t ask about “how things were going,” with the songs and the album. I didn’t want to add any stress to their process of making the follow up to their highly successful album, whokill, though we talked a lot about making something to fulfill a contract, on a deadline, under scrutiny.

I’ve toured in small doses. I’ve played to crowds large enough to where I couldn’t see the back of the room (not my music, but still). I’ve dealt some with labels and press and things like that, but I’ve never made creative work with anything like the stakes that Tune-Yards is making their new album.

I interviewed Merrill over a year ago, before she’d started writing the new record. She expressed some concern about how it was going to go, but she said that eventually she’d move past her anxieties and get back to the business of being herself. Talking with her now, on the other side of the hurdle, it was impressive to see how well she managed to look past all the pressures and just focus on doing her work. Continue reading →