A Different View Merrill Garbus She describes her band as “a three-person rhythm section where two people are making up the drumkit for a lot of the time.” The leader of Tune-Yards is obviously willing to go pretty far out to realize her unique musical vision. We wanted to find out why, and how. by Will Romano Merrill Garbus, the founder and leader of Tune-Yards, is nothing if not eclectic. In one moment Garbus stitches carefree, singsong lyrical tapestries reminiscent of children’s nursery rhymes. In the next she’s belting it out like a blues survivor or an R&B diva, as if her life depended on it. Part songwriter, part griot, part rhythm sorceress, Garbus is a ukulele-plucking, genre-hopping compositional hunter and gatherer whose songs are an amalgam of non-Western styles such as African and Haitian music, twentieth-century classical minimalism, rock, folk, electronic dance, melodic pop, and hip-hop. In concert, Garbus […]