Private Life

Album: I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life (2018)
Play Video

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."

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Carol Kaye

Carol KayeSongwriter Interviews

A top session musician, Carol played on hundreds of hits by The Beach Boys, The Monkees, Frank Sinatra and many others.

Corey Hart

Corey HartSongwriter Interviews

The Canadian superstar talks about his sudden rise to fame, and tells the stories behind his hits "Sunglasses At Night," "Boy In The Box" and "Never Surrender."

Lita Ford

Lita FordSongwriter Interviews

Lita talks about how they wrote songs in The Runaways, and how she feels about her biggest hit being written by somebody else.

Rosanne Cash

Rosanne CashSongwriter Interviews

Rosanne talks about the journey that inspired her songs on her album The River & the Thread, including a stop at the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Kevin Godley

Kevin GodleySongwriter Interviews

Kevin Godley talks about directing classic videos for The Police, U2 and Duran Duran, and discusses song and videos he made with 10cc and Godley & Creme.

Stand By Me: The Perfect Song-Movie Combination

Stand By Me: The Perfect Song-Movie CombinationSong Writing

In 1986, a Stephen King novella was made into a movie, with a classic song serving as title, soundtrack and tone.