Savvy Women

I want to blog this really cool musical ensemble called tUnE-yArDs. To help me accomplish this, I’ve included a video of “Bizness,” the sixth track on tUnE-yArDs’ second (and newest) CD, WHOKILL, released in April of this year.

tUnE-yArDs is the brainchild of Merrill Garbus, a thirty-something musical talent who seems to have come out of nowhere to take the Indie music world by storm. I’ll be the first to admit that I knew almost nothing about her and her group until I discovered WHOKILL and was totally blown away by the collection.

I’ve done a few of these musical blogs and always find them extremely challenging. (Thinking about why I like a particular musical group and then trying to verbalize my reasoning is a lot like trying to explain why I’m fond of chocolate ice cream.) I’m fond of chocolate ice cream because I’m fond of chocolate ice cream. (It’s as simple and as complicated as that.) So, I like Merrill Garbus’ music because I like Merrill Garbus’ music.

I can share some of the things I recently learned about Garbus and her band in preparing to write this. tUnE-yArDs started as a one-woman project and she eventually added other musicians to the mix as her compositions became more multidimensional. Until recently, Garbus was totally unknown and (I’m quoting) was so broke that she lived “in a moldy basement and was on food stamps.” She has a background in improvisational theatre and likes to compose and record her songs spontaneously. While in college, Garbus visited Africa on a student-exchange program and has had “a decade-long fascination with Africa and African culture and music.”

I think you can really hear and feel Africa in “Bizness.”

If you’d like to see a pretty video of Garbus “unplugged,” check out this.