Bird-Brains

Merrill came from parents who sewed their lives together with music, and at age seven she proceeded to hum her way through days. She hummed her way through the family record collection: Old Timey fiddling, Revolver, Django. She hummed her way through mid-'80s pop radio and an obsession with Christmas music. She hummed her way through folk music camp, through Smith College and a theater degree, through anarchist puppet training, through brazen, all-women a cappella singing, through heat rash in Kenya, through deeply scrutinized puppet performances in Europe, through her lonely, swirling 20's. The hum seems to have become a yell. In 2008 she released BiRd-BrAiNs, which she had recorded over a span of 2.5 years on a hand-held voice recorder. Sampling snippets of her life as a nanny on Martha's Vineyard and later as a young musician in noisy urban settings, she weaved sounds together to make substantial rhythms and then layered her ukulele and vocals over top.