Interview: Merrill Garbus, musician

Somehow, during an hour's conversation with her while her tour van rolls through southern France, her typographical affectation makes perfect sense. If you're the daughter of "hippy weirdo" parents and used to work with puppets until it wasn't clear who was pulling the strings, if you love show-tunes, hip-hop and African rhythms equally, believe that the ukulele is key to successfully bringing these sounds together – oh, and another thing, you wear war-paint – then tUnE-yArDs starts to seem understated, as if what's really required is a generous sprinkling of asterisks.

Garbus has just released her second album, Whokill, to great acclaim. The first one, Bird-Brains, won rave reviews as well, although she reckons she's probably lost some fans along the way. "The first one was recorded at home on a portable dictaphone, very lo-fi," she says. "This time I had a studio with synths and everything." In a smaller way, then, she's done what Dylan did when he went electric and is hoping for the same result.

"The reason the drums sound so big on the first album is that I was covering up for the fact I didn't own a bass guitar. But I sold a song from that record for a Blackberry ad and with the money I was able to pay off my debts, which were considerable, make donations to some good causes and afford the sessions for Whokill. Did I feel guilty doing that? Yes, and I still do. But people aren't buying albums so much these days, and the ones who'd crucify me for getting into bed with a phone company are probably the same ones downloading my music for free. I understand that anarchistic economy and even agree with bits of it, but I'm a 32-year-old woman who needs to make a living."

In any case, the sound is still recognisably tUnE-yArDs – avant-pop, fizzing with ideas. Her songs don't shirk from heavy themes (race, body issues, sexual politics, yuppie guilt), but Garbus is not in the least bit precious about her music. She says its "African-ness" is overstated, though it's true that the hypnotic beats of the Wagogo tribe which she heard while studying in Tanzania changed how she wrote songs. And she's well aware the ukulele is a comedy instrument.

"I get asked about Tiny Tim a lot," she says "and people say the ukulele will never be fashionable because of him, but I think he had real character." Indeed, some interviews she's done have been entirely ukulele-based and the idea there might be a magazine entirely devoted to the tiny guitar isn't so far-fetched; Garbus herself subscribes to Tom Tom Magazine, the journal for female drummers. So did these interviewers bring up the other hot tUnE-yArDs topic of her occasionally explicit lyrics like the one which goes, "My man likes me from behind"? "No, they were only interested in my uke!"

The ukulele has survived from Garbus' puppetry days. Growing up in New England, she studied theatre at university. "My mum is a piano teacher and my dad plays fiddle, so naturally I decided I couldn't follow them into music. It's funny being in France again because I came here with a puppet company – my first time in Europe. God, I hate puppets.

"That's a bit strong, but it was a strange period. The style was Bunraku, which is traditional Japanese where the puppets are supposed to breathe like humans. Performances were intense and I suffered from stage-fright. On top of that I had an eating disorder. I don't think the puppets quite took me over, but a psychic told me they would probably become manifestations of my spiritual sense. That seemed to be borne out when I came up with this opera based on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, his satire about the poor Irish selling their babies as food to rich folk. It was time to say goodbye to the puppets."

It's even harder to quibble with Garbus' decision to cash in on her music when she describes how, for the best part of six years, she lived illegally in Montreal, on food stamps. "Sometimes I'd rake in dumpsters for something to eat, other times it would be popcorn for dinner again. Friends helped out, and so did my upper middle-class parents, but bless them, they'd laid down that once I'd flown the nest I was on my own and I accepted that. It was an extreme struggle and yet there was also this wonderful freedom of not being bound to anything."

Garbus is clearly a one-off, or at least one who only gets compared to, and acknowledges the influence of, other highly individual talents: Yoko Ono, Nina Simone, Bjork, Aretha Franklin. To that list she would add Sheila E, despite her popular image of being just another member of Prince's hareem. As any Tom Tom Magazine reader must know, she's a fantastic drummer.

For a while, after Garbus had stopped fighting a career in music, she found being in other people's bands difficult. "I knew the kind of music I wanted to make and it wasn't like a lot of stuff I was hearing, where the artist seemed very safe behind the studio glass and there was a lack of grittiness and the sense you were getting close to their heart and soul. Even so, I never imagined that enough people would be interested in what I had to say. It's wonderfully weird."

Or rather: wOnDeRfUlLy wEiRd.

Whokill (4AD) is out now. tUnE-yArDs plays the Captain's Rest, Glasgow, on 15 June

This article was originally published in Scotland on Sunday on June 5th 2011