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 Rishikesh Hirway.
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 tune yard song, it has to have some dirty nasty to it.
In this episode, Meryl Garbus of Tune 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 Knack climbed the Billboard charts and got widespread critical praise.
My name is Meryl 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 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 like 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.