Song Exploder - tUnE-yArDs - Water Fountain

Episode Date: May 18, 2015

In this episode, Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs breaks down "Water Fountain." It's a song that draws inspiration from the politics of drought and dancehall reggae, and you'll hear how (and why) she tried to make this song less catchy. Despite that effort, in 2014 the tUnE-yArDs album Nikki Nack climbed the Billboard Charts and got widespread critical praise.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. You know, I want my music to be a product of the world that I am growing up in and growing older in. So if this song is going to exist as a Toon Yard song, it has to have some dirty, nasty to it. In this episode, Merrill Garbus of Toon Yards breaks down the song Water Fountain. It draws inspiration from the politics of drought and from dancehall reggae. Coming up, you'll hear how and why she tried to make the song less catchy.

Despite that effort, in 2014, the Tune Yards album, Nicky Nack, climbed the billboard charts and got widespread critical praise. My name is Merrill Garbus, and I make music under the name Tune Yards. Nate Brenner is a co-writer on most of the songs now that Tune Yards creates. It was January of 2013, and I was like, okay, it's the new year, and now I'm going to start to make a new album. And so I kind of forced myself into this routine where I'd go into my little studio, which was a shipping container that had been made into a little rehearsal studio. So I was there in this super hot metal box sitting at a computer and trying to make all these demos. So I'd been taking a lot of walks around Oakland.

And I was walking around Lake Merritt, which is just down the street from where we live. And I would just walk around that lake a whole lot. And passing water fountains, some of them working, some of them not working. And at that time, I was hearing stuff about conservatives, not wanting to. to pay taxes and I just kind of let my brain wander like, you know, what if no one ever paid taxes and what if no one ever decided that it was worth it to put money into our greater good? Seeing that through my imagination that, you know, no roads, no sidewalks, no water founts. I don't know.

There was something about the rhythm of my walking and the rhythm of that phrase that, no, water in the water fountain, that just like came out of that. The lyric and the melody and the sing-songyness of it and the topic. of it. I think all came bundled up into one. When two yards began, I was really interested in rhythm being a huge part of that. I just am super obsessed with the interplay between rhythms and this creation of a greater rhythmic hole when you have these multiple rhythmic voices going on at the same time. So the three, two, and the other two, three. And that was me, you know, in the hot box, just layering claps over one over another.

and just saying, okay, that's a start to something. And then I kind of would just hear what was missing. Like, where can I fill in even more gaps between those two clapping parts? And what I came up was this. So it's really those three rhythms laid over each other. I love when things are human and not machine-like, obviously, as anyone listening to this music would know, it is not perfect by any means. but there's a tipping point at which I go, nope, I was a little bit too off the beat there

for use in a song that I really wanted to be a dance song. The story of this song is basically that I almost threw it away because I thought it was dumb. It just sounded like really simple. I mean, think about me spending hours trying to work out laying my claps over one another and then coming up with the words like no wood in the woodstock. No wood in the woodstock. What the hell does that mean? And I was like, this is so annoying.

And I'm annoying and everything sucks. And Nate had a hot box across from mine. And he would walk over every afternoon. It would be like a sanity check. And I'd be like, this sucks. And he'd be like, no, no, it's cool. And he came in and he played the first bass line that comes in. And I thought rhythmically his baseline was awesome.

But I thought, no, it sounds too right. Like if you play in that kind of major key, then it's going to sound too right. and it needs to sound a little bit more wrong. We kind of fought about it a little bit in our peaceful way. And then he came up with if he's playing in minor. And all of a sudden, the color of the song completely changes. And that was really important to me that the things that this song was talking about to me were really heavy.

And so it didn't make sense to just keep the whole song in major. It was like, this is disturbing. That's kind of where he was like, well, how about this? And I was like, how about that? And then we're like, okay, both. Saved up all my pennies and I gave them to this special guy When he had enough of them, he bought himself a cherry pie He gave me blood soaks in the store

It's still this pretty simple major melody But then you just make the bass line minor And all of a sudden it's like the stomach churning part of the song Where all of a song you know that something's gonna go down You know now there are a lot of people involved in tune yards the record label and our manager and they were like, this is it, man, this is the single, this is the catchy one. Can you please just make it less dissonant? And I was like, no. I really can't. I mean, Tuneard started when I was listening to a ton of dance hall reggae. And there's

something about the tradition of reggae that for so many reasons, there's this dissonance and this kind of dub sensibility where there are things that feel wrong. or don't link up exactly, but there's so much implied in that disagreement between elements. There's some reggae albums where you feel like the singer came in and sang and couldn't hear the track, and then the track that they end up putting underneath the singer is like a totally different song with a different key. So I love that sense of wrong. wrong parts put together, but then when it comes back together as a whole, it has this whole

different conversation of wrongness. You know, no water in the water fountain is, it's like a horrible concept, even more so now in California, but in 2013, too, we were talking about the drought. And it was terrifying to me to allow my imagination to go that far and think of life without water coming out of your taps. You know, even just talking about these things now, it's like this really uncomfortable tension in my stomach. And I think that's the feeling that I love to evoke in songs where I'm not writing pretty songs for people to fall in love to necessarily. I'm writing songs that sound more like the truth of the world to me. And that has to mean that that's literally built into the song, that's literally built into the harmonies or the friction or that grading sense of the song.

And that's kind of why, I don't know, I was listening to that drum machine stem. And at first it's got the cute little cowbell sound. And then throughout the song, as you get to the end of the song, it's like this crazy distorted mess of a drum machine. I found this awesome water bottle at the thrift store, and it's just like these things that kind of fit into the world of the song, like spare parts kind of sounds. Like a water bottle just evokes water somehow. Even if you're not saying, oh, it's a water bottle.

There's just something about it that's like, yep, that fits in. So this is where the brilliant John Hill. comes in because he introduced the laser sound. Now, we were so nervous working with other producers, and I'm very possessive of the term producer because I feel like, you know, I am my own producer. But we took the song in at the request of some of our label people and played it for John Hill, who's worked on a lot of cool stuff.

Rihanna and MIA, and so he had those lasers for us. And I played those lasers on a sample pad, with a stick. So we all agree that that was again another dance hall element that amps up the song when it's like, and now the lasers come in. You know what it is? That's just me and my voice and my tongue making some crazy roll in there. But then sampled and played on a keyboard. So that we did with John Hill as well. We sampled my voice and then I was able to play it on a midi triggering keyboard and I could play chords with my own voice doing that crazy gurgly noise. I am so captivated by music, the ability to speak without words. The sound itself is telling

the story and it's kind of like a big puzzle that even I am trying to figure out. It's so fun. The recording is amazing. And now here's Water Fountain by Tune Yards in its entirety. For links to buy Water Fountain and to learn more about Tune Yards visit Song Exploing I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations

about the process of making music talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. and this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April,

and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In The Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. In the next episode, composer Brian Tyler tells the story of taking heroic elements and turning them into something sinister to create the opening title for the movie Avengers, Age of Ultron. You can find all the past and future episodes of Song Exploder at SongExploder. Or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated

network of extraordinary story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi-Kesh hereway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.