also a musician in her band)! Nate and I became a couple and band mates around the same time. Our first tour as a band was with Te Dirty Projectors in Europe so that was quite romantic! Learning how to work together was the best and the hardest part; learning how to share and collaborate but also how to protect my music and to say “No, that’s not what I had envisioned for this song” or “Tat’s great but can you change it to this”. I really needed to be assertive to a certain extent. Nate is one of the more gentle and collaborative people I know but as a woman and also as a relatively untrained musician it really took a while for me to respect myself and my own vision for things. Tat was really difficult for me. How was it working with Malay and John Hill on Nikki Nack? It was the first time you’d used outside producers, right? Were you nervous about it? Once we got there it was so much easier than I ever imagined. I think I had a lot of preconceived notions about how horrible it would be! It turned out they were just extremely respectful and gentle guys. Tey were much more interested in what we thought rather than telling us what to do. Everyone’s goal, and I know this now because I’ve recently been producing on my own for other people a little bit, is to make the best album that the artist’s going to be happy with. It makes no sense to make a record that the artist loathes and doesn’t want to put out into the world. I had so many fears; I don’t see too many women producers. I have seen a lot of women artists who have been bullied into making music that doesn’t feel right, myself included, so I’m really sensitive about that. But this experience was really positive for me. What would you say sets each of your albums apart from each other? I think they’ve grown increasingly more polished and dense. Tey are extremely different aren’t they? I was listening to Whokill the other day (Merrills’ second album) and I was like, wow, we’ve grown so much! I would say that Bird-Brains is a lo-fi bedroom album and Whokill was a kind of in between lo- fi bedroom album and a polished studio record. It has a lot of grainy edges in there
14 / June 2015/
outlineonline.co.uk
“When you go through a very quick rise to notoriety I think your soul and heart goes lthrough a
ot.”
which I was determined to keep, but also I was dabbling in a studio setting. To be very critical of Nikki Nack, the latest album, I tried to stretch myself compositionally, and that meant it’s pretty challenging to play live! We hadn’t played the songs in a live setting before we put them on record. I think I always need be very self critical when I finish an album in order to move onto the next one. Have you started thinking about a fourth album yet? Yeah, it’s exciting because after Whokill came out I
felt really burnt out and this time I don’t feel that way; I feel really excited for whatever’s next. I’ve thought about it, but haven’t come up with any concrete answers yet! Nate and I have talked about starting to improvise on some stuff, so I think that means the next album will be us trying to work on some things before we finish touring in September and trying some things out live. It’s exciting! Between Whokill and Nikki Nack you went to Haiti and took voodoo drum and dance lessons. What was that
experience like? Where we live in Oakland, California there’s a strong Haitian song and dance community here. Voodoo comes from Vodou and it’s a very strong and old tradition of drumming that involves multiple voices of drums; three different drumming parts is usual. I started taking dance lessons here and my dance teacher was leading a trip later that spring to Haiti so I went along and played drums. It was a different kind of drumming to what I’d done before and it had its own rules and rhythms that you have to know. It was about getting really deep into a tradition of music and that helped me to compose new music and look at rhythm in a very different way. My soul felt tired after Whokill; when you go through a very quick rise to notoriety I think your soul and heart goes through a lot. I needed to get centred again into why I liked music and ask myself if I really wanted to do this, as it surely is exhausting. It’s hard living this lifestyle, talking to strangers about your personal life and innermost thoughts, although you’re a very nice stranger sometimes people aren’t so nice! I would say it was good to get back to a more spiritual sense of music with vodou at that time.
Lizz Page INFORMATION You can donate to tUnE-yArDs’
fund for water-related causes here
tuneyards.com/thewaterfountain. tUnE-yArDs play the Waterfront
on 5th June. Tickets are available from
uea.ticketbookings.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64