How Tune-Yards Became the House Band for the Boots Riley Cinematic Universe

Given the many delightfully strange elements packed into Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley’s 2018 directorial debut, one could be forgiven for overlooking its musical score. But from start to finish, the vocal-looped compositions created by Tune-Yards (Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner) play a key role in bringing Riley’s surreal version of Oakland to life.

The same is true in I’m A Virgo, Riley’s new series for Amazon Prime, which debuted on June 23 to rave reviews. The story, which follows a 13-foot-tall 19-year-old named Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) as he first discovers life outside his house, spans tones and genres; the plot contains elements of a superhero story, a heist movie, a romance, a buddy movie — there’s even an animated show-within-the-show.

What’s consistent is the score, which works subtly but powerfully, almost as its own character. No one in modern pop music uses vocals as an instrument quite the way Tune-Yards does. Garbus’ voice surrounds the viewer, becoming a siren, then percussion; it’s layered into a Greek chorus; its timbre shifts nimbly with the show’s mood. The effect here is expansive — it adds weight to the storyline’s central tragedy, brings a light sweetness to Cootie’s experience of falling in love, and imbues action scenes with a colorful, off-kilter urgency.

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Virgo also seems to confirm that Tune-Yards has become the house band for the Boots Riley cinematic universe — the Danny Elfman to his Tim Burton, if you will — which means we can likely expect more from the partnership in years to come. (Riley has said he thinks of Sorry to Bother You and I’m A Virgo as tracks No. 1 and 2 in a seven- or eight-track “cinematic album.”)

While Garbus and Brenner work on material for a new Tune-Yards record, the score to I’m A Virgo should be released on vinyl later this year. We called them up to hear more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Emma Silvers: How did you and Boots meet? Were you fans of each other’s work first?

Nate Brenner: I believe Gabby [La La], his wife, liked Tune-Yards, and showed him some of our music. And then maybe he saw us at Stern Grove? But the first time we really met was New Year’s Eve 2012, when he opened for Erykah Badu at the Fox. His energy when he performed was just unbelievable.

Merrill Garbus: [His son] Django was only a couple months old at the time, and he was like, wearing him, with the little headphones on, hanging out between sets at the Fox.

I grew up on the East Coast, so I only knew of the Coup peripherally, but once I started listening it was just completely up my alley. Coming from where I come from — my grandparents kind of hovered around the communism of New York Jews in the ’40s and ’50s, and I have a background in a lot of the stuff that I was hearing in the music.

Had you ever scored a film before Sorry to Bother You? How did that part of your partnership begin?

Merrill Garbus: He was like “I’m making a movie, and I want you to do the music. Can I send you the screenplay?” A lot of times when people say they want Tune-Yards to score something, they mean they want us to write “Bizness” over again, or they want us to write “Water Fountain” over again. But with Boots, I had a feeling he was like, “No, I want all the weird of you.”

Honestly, it sounded too amazing to ever be made into a movie. But I was like, sure, I’ll make some weird music. So we started demoing and recording, and we’d meet at Awaken Cafe and just talk. He wanted a lot of my vocals, and I was using a lot of this harmonizer pedal I was into at that time.

But no, we had never scored a film before. If you had asked me before if I wanted to, I probably would have been like “Ha! Sure.” But — maybe because I didn’t go to school for music — it always seemed out of the realm of possibility for me.

This show is set in a surreal version of Oakland. Were you consciously thinking about the sound of the Town when you were writing this score?

Merrill Garbus: I think about Oakland and Oakland music traditions all the time, with the discomfort and self-consciousness of not growing up here, having moved here in 2009. I think Nate and Boots share a lot more of the George Clinton and Bootsy [Collins] thing, Nate grew up listening to that music. But I came to the Coup late, I came to E-40 late. I grew up on the East Coast with New York hip-hop and, like, Dave Matthews Band, the music of suburban Connecticut.

Which is all to say, with the exception of the our very first record, all our albums — the music that has really made Tune-Yards Tune-Yards — has been when I’ve lived in Oakland, and it’s always me trying to figure myself out here, myself as a white person here. I almost want to say “as an expat.”

With this show, though, I thought a lot about wanting to honor the fact that he asked us to do this, he wanted Tune-Yards music. So we’re gonna do Tune-Yards music, knowing that Oakland is being filtered through us. Or maybe we’re being filtered through Oakland. Also, the references he gave us were so out there — like, from a Japanese film from the ’50s. If he wanted music that came from Oakland, he knows how to do that. But he wanted the world. He wants everything.

Were there any particularly challenging scenes or elements?

Merrill Garbus: Definitely the psychic theater [a few segments in which Jones, an organizer played by Kara Young, delivers monologues about capitalism]. The last one is like seven and a half minutes of a character breaking down the exploitative and racist nature of capitalism. It really needs the music to help an audience stick around for that — even though Kara’s acting is amazing, and it’s extremely dynamic. But that’s another problem: how do you use music to move it along and also not get in the way of the dialogue?

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Those scenes are so wild to watch — for me, there was an element of “I can’t believe this is real, that this is going to be on a TV show distributed by Amazon.”

Merrill Garbus: It’s definitely the first time I’ve seen an organizer as the main character in a TV show. There are just so many things [in this show that] we haven’t seen in mainstream culture. But there are organizers all over this country. And now someone could see that and think, ‘Oh, I want to do that in my community. I’ve never seen it before.’ It feels really instructive of how to use art in a way that can tap into people’s imaginations, open them up to different futures.

I’ll just say I hope this continues to be the time in our lives where we get to keep working with Boots Riley. Sorry to Bother You was a big change for me, and how I related to music. I think that indie pop, Pitchfork-y world of the mid-2000s that Tune-Yards came up in — I started to feel kind of constricted as an artist, as a creator. And it’s so satisfying to see Boots kind of bloom in pop culture at this particular moment in time. Just to be around him and be part of his creative universe has really opened my mind … It’s reinvigorated my sense of curiosity and inventiveness and wanting to do things that have never been done before.

We worked harder on I’m A Virgo than we have in a really long time, up late at night after our kid went to bed. Even just the amount of music that we wrote … it was all super intense.

Nate Brenner: It’s one of those where, when you’re in the middle of it, you’re like, oh, we need a vacation as soon as this is over. But then when it’s over you’re like … what am I doing? And you just want to be working on it again.

‘I’m A Virgo’ is streaming now on Amazon Prime. Tune-Yards is scheduled to perform at Gundlach Bundschu Winery in Sonoma on Aug. 22 and at the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley on Aug. 23; details here.