Tune-Yards On New EP, 20 Years Together, And Raising A Child As Musicians

Anya Ganesh

Hi! I’m Anya from Glasgow, Scotland and I’m so excited to be writing for Clunk! Gigs are my happy place and my desert-island band is James. I’m also a trained pianist and play a little bit of drums, and I have two golden retrievers that I love to bits.

We chat with California duo Tune-Yards, following the release of ‘Tell the Future With Your Body’: their new EP and second release of 2025

Following their album ‘Better Dreaming’ and new EP ‘Tell the Future With Your Body,’ both released this year, we caught up with the wildly talented and interesting California-based duo Tune-Yards. Read about their takes on music videos, musicianship blending with parenthood, star signs, and much more below

So… How’d you meet?

Merrill: How did we meet? We met while teaching at a summer camp for kids, 20 years… 20 years ago! 2005! Dude, we let that anniversary go by (chuckles).

Was it in your hometown that you met as well?

Merrill: No, the camp was in New Jersey, in farmland south of New York. And it was really hot and I didn’t have a great time that summer. I think Nate had a better time than I did. But I grew up on the East Coast, and Nate grew up in Indiana.

Have Oakland or California worked their way into a lot of your music, or is it more of different places you’ve been which have stuck with you?

Merrill: That’s a good question. I mean, since the second Tune-Yards record, it’s really been very Oakland influenced. ‘Gangsta‘ was written here. Even before I was living here, I was visiting Nate. It’s a city that doesn’t treat you lightly, it kind of grabs you. So, yeah, from the second Tune-Yards record, Oakland’s been really embedded in it, including just learning lyrically (since I write the lyrics), about myself in this city.

One of my favorite things about your music is how textured all of it is. What would you say is the most surprising non-musical element which you’ve worked into a song?

Nate: One of my recent favorites is in ‘Limelight‘. We have our dog Coco barking in it and we sampled her growl and bark and wove it into the drumbeat.

Merrill: Yeah, and I guess our child’s voice too. I’m trying to think of this latest record, those are probably the ones. But usually, there are some objects that are just lying around… I think we do it so regularly that it’s hard to remember, because anything we have in arm’s length is fair game.

At a gig what would be your guiltiest-pleasure cover, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit in with the rest of the set list?

Nate: Probably… ‘Another One Bites the Dust‘.

Merrill: Queen, totally! Yeah! I mean, that fits pretty well. I feel like there are things that I used to feel guilty about liking. Now I’m just like… I don’t feel guilty about that at all. I mean, ‘Another One Bites the Dust‘ is good. Especially because we’ve been playing these things for our child too. So, you know, I don’t know any other context for songs other than like… he can dance to it, so they’re guilt free now.

A lot of duos and/or couples seem to have a dynamic where one person is a little more free-spirited and messy, and the other is the organised one — the one keeping track of calendars and details. What’s your dynamic like?

Merrill: I’m definitely the messy one (laughs).

Nate: But you know what’s interesting is that I think Merrill is the messier one in the physical world, but she’s more neat in the digital world, with all her spreadsheets, versus I’m more messy in the digital world and more neat in the physical world.

Merrill: Although apparently our astrological signs are all 2000 years out of date, a lot of the ways we have interpreted the dynamics in our relationship are through astrological signs, which are helpful, to just say I’m a Pisces with a Taurus moon who meets a Taurus with a Pisces moon.

So I can say Tauruses are all about the home. And he’s folding the laundry while I’m making a mess in the kitchen. And I’m, like… dreaming. I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming up all these things. And he’s like, “this is how it’s going to practically work in the real world.” So I think astrology has helped us a lot, probably in our relationship just to kind of say, like, we work differently, but we therefore compromise.

Nate: Yeah. And I think because for the past ten out of the last fifteen years or whatever, we’ve been on tour, which is really helpful, because when you’re on tour, you don’t have to necessarily make your own bed or do the dishes because you’re in a hotel there.

Merrill: That’s true. We bypassed that for many years.

That’s really interesting. Is astrology something which you’ve always practiced?

Merrill: You know, how did we get into it? I mean, I feel like I have a bit, but I feel like Chani Nicholas really got us into it because she’s so, so accurate. It just feels very, very true.

Nate: Yeah, but I am lucky that my parents got me a star chart when I was first born. So at least there, you know, there’s some element in my childhood of being interested in it. But definitely I’d say around like 2019 or so was when we started really getting obsessed.

Merrill: Why? What was it?

Nate: Who knows?

Merrill: Who knows? (chuckles)

A lot of musicians describe making social media content or music videos as something of a necessary evil these days, given how much the way people consume music has changed. I love the content on your socials and your music videos that I’ve watched. Is content creation something that you enjoy, or is it more of a task?

Merrill: I feel for me, I love- it feels really important to me. I know we have fans and I know we have people who really believe in our music. And so I never want to do content ‘for the sake of it’. And I feel like there’s something about Tune Yards that has always had a kind of creative integrity, even from early posters for our shows or the album artwork, I feel like I’ve always understood that there’s a world that we’re creating, and I want everything that we put out to kind of fit in that world.

And social media is different. Thank you for saying that, I’m glad because I do try to work on what I really think that people who care about our music really want to know about, and go from there. We were working today on choosing these remixes for the remix contest that we did for one of our songs. We worked on a video together while we were on tour just to really try to have fun with it and show that, you know, we laugh a lot. So we want to share that with people. And, we love our lives as musicians, we love it. We’re so amazed that we get to make music for our livelihood. So, just try to give people a piece of that.

I love that you always look so genuinely happy in your music videos and you’re having fun on set. Do you enjoy being on camera and starring in your own videos?

Merrill: I’ve always been in our music videos, (to Nate) but you haven’t. How do you feel about it these days?

Nate: Well, I like it because I think it’s, again, just trying to show the listener our joy in the music. So it’s been really fun to make the music videos. And I think probably as we get older too, it’s less insecurity and more just not worrying what other people think about us and just being like, “This is our our song, our lives, let’s just have fun and dance”.

Merrill: Yeah, I feel for me, I’m like, “Wow, I’m so tired”. And when we shot the ‘Limelight‘ video, I remember just being like, “We have to shoot, we have to do this”. And our three year old is bouncing off the walls, we don’t have a babysitter, we have to do it right now. I’m like, “Shit, I have to get makeup on”, and had to figure out our outfits. We painted the wall of our house a color that would look good in videos just so that we could shoot photos and videos in front of it.

So there’s a lot… the reality is being parents of a young child and being often underslept. I think when it comes down to it, especially since Covid, probably, I just have this feeling, like every day is so precious and every moment that we get to do this is so precious.

I was driving last night home from something, and I was listening to the EP of ours that just came out yesterday because I was like, “Oh, look, we have this new music!” and I passed by the place where I’d written the lyrics to one of the songs, and I was like, this is amazing, I wrote a song at this cafe in a paper journal, and now I get to stream it on streaming services.

It’s almost like hearing yourself on the radio. And I think I just want to never let go of that part of me that (chuckles) was really into Madonna when I was eight years old and just these things where I’m like, “I could just star in my own music video, let’s have fun”.

Is that how a lot your songs often begin? In unexpected places rather than sitting down with the intention to write?

Merrill: It’s kind of like mixing a stew. It’s like a brew, a secret brew. So it’ll be the fact that we know that we’re starting to generate new material. And then I’m often walking around Oakland, walking or biking to our studio and just inviting melodies and words in. But a lot of times I find that I need to take special time to go write words down, because lyrics take me a long, long time. And so I need to have a whole lot to choose from. When we’re writing songs, I need to really take time and kind of get what’s going on in my brain out.

Have you got any bucket list gigs which haven’t been crossed off yet?

Merrill: Sure! Is it embarrassing to admit them? I mean, I want to play Red Rocks now that we’ve been in Colorado.

Nate: We have played there

Merrill: But we’ve opened for someone at Red Rocks. (To Nate) Let’s headline Red Rocks!

Merrill: And the Greek Theatre here, which is a beautiful outdoor Theatre where I just saw Yo-Yo Ma with Angélique Kidjo. But I mean, we played Glastonbury, of course we would love to play Glastonbury again.

Nate: Obviously the Greek Theatre is number one up there. But I think other than that it’s kind of like, you know, we’ve already done everything, like Outside Lands is one of my favorite festivals. And we’ve already played there, we’ve played Bonnaroo…

Merrill: We love Green Man, it’s one of my favorite festivals, and we got to play that again. I mean, in other words, universe, you’ve blessed us with so much. What more can we ask for? Let’s keep going and see what happens!

Nate: Fuji Rock was amazing. It’s almost like “what?!” With that question, it just makes me want to remember every amazing festival or venue we’ve already played.

Merrill: Yeah. Saturday Night Live… that’s always the thing. If Saturday Night Live still exists, when we happen to have a huge hit single, then that would make me happy.

From ‘Bird Brains‘ to the EP you just released, what feels most different about the way you work together now?

Merrill: Well, ‘Bird Brains‘ was 28 years of my life put into this thing that was just really me, by myself, which I really needed to do. But it was also, in retrospect, very lonely. And then the next record after that, Nate and I had been playing the songs from the next record out live. And so I think that was my introduction to being a band in a studio.

And now we get to record in our own studio, so there is that element of doing it ourselves, so to speak. But it feels like we have so much engineering experience, technical experience under our belts. And back then it was just me with a dictaphone, not even as high quality as this audio, probably (chuckles) recording all the sounds badly.

You know, maybe someday I’ll be like, “Bye, Nate, I’m going to go in a hole and record a record on my phone for a month!” or whatever…

Nate: Yeah, and I think our last album, the album where for the first time we were parents, a lot of that music was kind of informed by this… completely disorienting and new experience. And so now the EP feels like, “Okay, we have that under our belt”. We know we can be parents and musicians, so it’s more kind of like back to work in a good way, in a healthy way. It feels like we got over that hump.

Your album artwork always feels spot-on- it really looks like what you sound like. Who usually comes up with the designs? Is it a collaborative process?

Merrill: Well, Molly Styslinger, who did the artwork, she works at the record label. So for both ‘Better Dreaming‘ and the EP art, that was kind of like a conversation, like my Pinterest board of things that I was interested in. And then I shot those over to her and we talked about generally what the themes around the album and the artwork might be. Then out of that, she made and she experimented.

What I love about most Tune-Yards records is that they all involve some kind of tangible material, even though you’re looking at it on a two dimensional screen. But Molly did so much with actual objects and photographing, you know, strings and threads and paper and doing a really… analog thing with it, which is how our music feels. I always want Tune-Yards to have that feeling of, “there’s the human being, there’s an object, there’s a dog” …it’s clear that this is coming from real life. Even if the final product is a very digital sounding song, in the end.

If you could somehow beam one of the songs from yesterday’s EP, let’s say, 25 years into the future, which one would it be? Where would it go?

Merrill: That’s a really tough question.

Nate: I think it would be ‘Crawling Up’ and I’d put it at the bottom of the Grand Canyon (laughs).

Merrill: That’s a really good question, and I feel proud to say that I would feel proud to beam up all four of the songs, because I feel like they all do have to do with the squeeze of this time, and the impossibility of this time. Whether political, environmental, social. And so, I don’t know where it would go, but it feels to me like I’m wanting to be speaking to the future somehow. Tell The Future With Your Body, I guess! Dancing, dancing to the future.

Listen to ‘Tell the Future With Your Body’ here: