Don’t miss Tune-Yards when they take over First Avenue on June 7th!
After a period of feeling creatively lost, it was reconnecting with the blissful, bodily enjoyment of music that pulled Merrill Garbus back into the recording studio. “There started to be a shift in me – I realized that music is so enjoyable, and pleasurable,” says Merrill. “And I started feeling like, creativity is how we’re going to get out of these situations we’re in. The practice of being creative, through a time of feeling lost, suddenly felt really important.” After releasing the fourth Tune-Yards album, I can feel you creep into my private life, in 2018, she had felt sure that the time had come for Tune-Yards to retire. “I couldn’t see a future,” she remembers now. “After the last record, I felt really confused – even about how to be on stage.”
I can feel you… was an examination of Tune-Yards’ complicity in white supremacy and indebtedness to Black musical traditions, and formed a self-reflexive question mark at the end of a decade of outspoken, polyrhythmic indie music. From 2009 to 2018, Tune-Yards (Merrill and her partner and collaborator Nate Brenner) released four critically-acclaimed albums on 4AD, travelled the world relentlessly to play live shows, and composed the psychedelic score to Boots Riley’s surrealist cinematic masterpiece Sorry To Bother You.
Kicking the night off will be Anjimile. If each song on Anjimile Chithambo’s introspective 2020 debut, Giver Taker, was its own self- contained micro-journey of grief, hope, and identity, then their subsequent orchestral Reunion is fitting as a homecoming. It’s almost an extension, or sequel, to the ideas of rebirth Chithambo began excavating last year—a simultaneous resettling into, and reimagining of, their songwriting.
Tickets are still available HERE!
**Tune-Yards have partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from each ticket will benefit the PLUS1 Ukraine Relief Fund, supporting the people of Ukraine through effective grassroots nonprofits providing humanitarian aid, refugee support, and access to critical information.
