Private Life

Album: I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • This track quotes from the Ladysmith Black Mambazo "King of Kings."

    Reveal yourself, reveal yourself

    Tune Yards leader Merrill Garbus explained to NPR the quote "is a reference both to how that group influenced me as a musician as well as to the complications of [Paul Simon's] Graceland project. How does a musician like myself reconcile the legacy of Graceland, investigate what happened there and why, and how do I learn from that, and do better?"
  • This is the (sort of) title track of the fourth album by Tune Yards. Merrill Garbus admitted the record's name can be easily misinterpreted. She told The Guardian:

    "People assume it's some kind of privacy, Google thing, but it actually came through a meditation course that I did related to race and white privilege, trying to sit with the deep feelings of what it means to grow up in racism. These aren't things I can just sign petitions about or go to marches about – actually, there's a place that it lives inside of me. There's a concept of white fragility that's very hard for white people to hear when they are being racist. It's about trying to take that in without defensiveness."

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