Garbage’s Butch Vig, Shirley Manson, Duke Erikson, and Steve Marker (photo: Joseph Cultice)
The cover art for Garbage’s new album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, features an octopus, and that’s not just because it’s the iconic alt-rock band’s eighth record. The cephalopod has become a mascot or spirit animal of sorts for the eight-legged groove machine comprising vocalist Shirley Manson, drummer Butch Vig, and multi-instrumentalists Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, who — exactly 30 years after they completed recording their debut album — are still together in their original lineup, still galvanized and making some of the best and most critically acclaimed music of their career. They know this is incredibly rare, and they don’t take it for granted.
“It is this idea of an environment that we are all faced with protecting: The octopus exists in this environment that needs to be taken care of on a large scale,” muses Manson, sitting with her bandmates at a rustic wooden table at Highland Park’s hipster Hippo coffee shop. “It’s this weird creature that lurks in the shadows, a solitary figure that has eight limbs always reaching out in different directions, but has this center brain. That’s how we operate in the world. And so, it just became something — we named our group chat ‘Octopus,’ and then it just stuck. And then we talked about the ‘octopus.’ I mean, this is how bands work! There’s never any rhyme or reason. It gets written up on a whiteboard, and then it stays there for the duration of the record, and then it just becomes it becomes your reality by default.”
And that’s how Garbage have always operated, apparently. “When we started out, we had no plan. And we still don’t,” Marker chuckles. “I mean, there’s no way we could have said back then, ‘Oh, we’re going to stay together for 30 years.’ It just sort of happened. I mean, we’ve made it happen, but we’re lucky that we’ve been able to keep going like we have. You never know. Life is very fragile. We realize that, so we try to make every album as good as we can.”
Manson jokes that “the fact that they called themselves ‘Garbage’ says everything you need to know about the mentality that existed before the first record,” and Vig admits, “None of us had any intention of Garbage becoming a full-time band. I was working full-time as a producer and I thought, ‘We’ll put the Garbage record out, and we’ll see how it does.’” Vig reveals that when he and his colleagues, Erikson and Marker, first came up with the idea for this sort of producers’ supergroup, they actually had more of a Golden Palominos-style template in mind, with a rotation of different guest singers. “We thought we could make this collective between the three of us, and bring in other artists,” Vig explains. But then Marker saw a video by Manson’s band at the time, Scotland’s Angelfish, on MTV’s 120 Minutes — which led to a moment that in music lore has basically become the alternative-rock version of Lana Turner being discovered at Schwab’s.
“All of us in our studio had done years of two guitars, bass, and drums with a guy singing, usually screaming, and, we were just bored with that. We wanted to do basically the complete opposite of that. We wanted to go more down the path of Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, the type of vocalists that we all knew and love,” explains Marker. “We didn’t want a pretty, high, girly voice. We wanted a woman with an attitude.” Manson was clearly the woman for the job, and so, after the guys spent two weeks tracking her down in Edinburgh, they flew out to London for their first in-person meeting with her.
Vig had become recently renowned for his work on Nirvana’s landmark grunge classic Nevermind, but he wanted to do something totally different for Garbage — something electronic and less guitar-based, inspired by Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and remixes he and Marker had done for Beck, U2, Nine Inch Nails, and Depeche Mode — so the timing of this London lunch with Manson was symbolic in an also-unexpected, and downright eerie, way.
“I mean, this is a true story,” Vig says. “Shirley came over and we sat for three or four hours and just totally hit it off. We talked about art, politics, food. We didn’t really talk much about music or the direction of the record; we were more interested in just sort of feeling each other out and getting to know each other. I felt pretty good about it. I left the meeting around 4 or 4:30 and went to a pub to meet some other producers and engineers, and I thought, ‘This is going to be great!’ And I walked in and sat down, and they just stared at me. I was like, ‘What’s up?’ And they go, ‘Do you know that Kurt Cobain is dead?’ And that’s literally for me a day where one path in my life went down that road, and then flipped a switch and went down another road. The day I met Shirley was the day that Kurt Cobain died. It was crazy. It really was.”
Eventually, Shirley journeyed across the pond to Madison, Wisc., a leap-of-faith trip that she says was “definitely like a blind date,” to work with Vig, Marker, and Erikson — three men a decade older than her that she barely knew. “We were really fortunate that were just, like, slotted together. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody else, but it has been tremendously rewarding and successful for us,” she chuckles. “It was random, the way we came together, and it could have gone really, really bad badly for me. They could have been nasty. They could have been aggressive. That could have been sexist, misogynistic. I mean, there’s 1,000,000,001 things that could have [gone wrong].
“Duke picked me up from the airport and took me to this hotel where I was staying, which was the ‘poshest’s hotel in Madison at the time, but it was very dingy and rather unpleasant. And I was a bit freaked out, as you can imagine — just meeting Duke for the first time, taking me to this hotel that really felt like a knocking shop,” she continues, laughing. “I got into my room, I dropped my suitcase, and it was bright yellow. It was what they called the ‘Elvis Suite,’ but it wasn’t really a suite. And inside this room was a wooden, four-poster bed, covered in satin sheets! And I sat down on it, exhausted from the trip from Edinburgh, and it was a waterbed! And then I flopped back on it and I looked up, and it was a mirrored ceiling! And that’s when I began to freak out a bit. [Duke] was doubled over laughing, and I don’t know why, but I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m all right. I’m safe here.’ Because I could tell he realized how ghastly this was, and how scary it was for a young woman to arrive.
“So, I think actually I think the reason we are together still is the three men in this band are very kind,” Manson concludes. “I am not so kind, but they are very kind. And they have taught me to be kinder. I have definitely learned as I’ve gotten older to be kinder. But they are very kind, and it’s a kind atmosphere in the band.”
“How have we made you kinder?” Vig interjects playfully. “Drugs? Glasses of wine?”
“Lots of wine,” Marker quips. “Lots and lots of wine.”
“You’re kind people,” Manson insists. “Even though you fucking annoy the shit out of me.”
“I’ve worked with a lot of bands, and really, nobody else functions like we do. It just doesn’t happen. Usually there’s one person who’s the leader of the band or writes the songs or whatever, but we’ve always shared everything, every sort of aspect about what it means to be creative in Garbage. And I think that’s one of the reasons that we’re still here after 30 years,” Vig ponders a bit more seriously. “I also think one of the reasons that Garbage works is that we share a lot of similar sensibilities in terms of politics, culture, our view of the world. We’re foodies. We like to drink wine. We love cinema and books and art, and we talk about that a lot. We’re not always just talking about music. Lately we talk a lot about politics, because who doesn’t talk about politics? But I think that that’s a strength in the band, that we can sit down and have lunch or dinner together. Because a lot of bands don’t do that — you can see there’s friction and they don’t like each other. And we actually love each other.”
photo: Joseph Cultice
And 30 years later, that love — and the band members’ shared political views — can be deeply heard and felt throughout Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, which Manson describes as a kinder, gentler “companion piece” to 2021’s vicious and vitriolic No Gods No Masters. The new album opens with the cheekily and actually deceptively titled “There’s No Future in Optimism,” a “rallying cry” that Manson says is “literally about whether we’re going to be brave enough to try and practice kindness and love and tolerance, rather than violence and oppression.” It’s a different approach for Manson, not just compared No Gods No Masters, but to her body of work in general.
“I never write about love — I mean gooey love. I’ve just been interested in it. It bores the shit out of me, quite honestly,” Manson points out. “I think it’s really fake and really not rooted in reality. But I think real, deep love is the dirt and the grime and the shit and the blood and the pain and the suffering and the loneliness and the grief. And really, our only salvation will be love. Not more hate, not more intolerance, not more othering, not more like obliteration. … So, there is a lot of hope on this record. To me, it’s not optimism — it’s defiance.”
Manson says she actually hadn’t planned on getting lyrically political on Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, “because the last record had been so on-the-nose. But of course, we found ourselves in these harrowing times, and I felt like it would be a dereliction of duty to pretend that everything was just hunky-dory and that I wasn’t noticing anything that was going on in the world. But I realized that if you keep hammering people over the head, they just tune it all out. And what I really wanted to focus my own energies on was the idea of love.
“As I said, I’ve never written about love in my whole life. I’ve always thought it’s super-corny, and in a way it is corny. But I feel like the times are calling for corny. I realized in order for me to survive as a human being and as an artist, I really had to try and find the love in me, because I felt like razing everything to the ground, and I realized that’s really dangerous. When you get to that point, when you want to destroy instead of build and create, that’s a really perilous place to be,” Manson elaborates. “And I was aware that if I steeped myself in the same energies as the last record, I would probably never get out of my bed. And I was already bed-bound for much of the recording process for this record, so this was an attempt on my part to try and raise my spirits. I think that was the driver for me, personally, in the making of this record.”
Manson is referring to her long and grueling recovery from two hip-replacement surgeries, related to injuries she sustained when she toppled off the stage while performing at the KROQ Weenie Roast in 2016. Her medical issues forced the band to try other new approaches to music-making that — again, unexpectedly, as is obviously the case with so many developments in Garbage’s unorthodox career — galvanized them creatively and helped them bond even more closely as a team.
“In the beginning of this record, Shirl was not even in the studio. She was laid up at home,” explains Erikson. “So, me, Steven, and Butch were working in the studio and sending her ideas for songs, hoping that she would like it or be able to be able to come up with something, be somehow inspired to write lyrics, So, it was a bit different this time.”
“It seems like we can’t really help ourselves from sending ideas back and forth. And this [album] kind of just started happening on its own, really,” says Marker. “We started doing demos at home and putting ideas in email, and people started getting excited. … We got addicted to that feeling.”
“It was overwhelming. … I was quite shocked by what the band were sending me. It just wasn’t what I expected, and it obviously dictated a lot of where we went on this record, these soundscapes. It wasn’t typical rock ‘n’ roll. It was really singular and at times really beautiful, and it always took these weird, unexpected turns,” Manson marvels. “It was a very bizarre way of working, and a way we’ve never worked before, but after 30 years of being together, that’s actually a really great thing. It was a great opportunity to upset our apple cart and try something new.”
“Shirl did a lot of the vocals in bed with a handheld mic, because she was recovering from surgery. When [Garbage] first started out [in the ‘90s], we felt like we had to be in a ‘proper’ studio to record, but we’re so DIY now — like, whatever circumstances you deal with, that’s how we’ll record it,” shrugs Vig. “And I honestly think that the way Shirley did a lot of the vocals gave the album a real intimacy.”
One of the new album’s most effective bedroom-captured tracks is “The Day That I Met God,” which Manson recorded while “literally out of my mind on painkillers” in one take. “I’d been doing rehab on my treadmill, which is often how I write, because of something about movement… it’s rhythmic, and you get into a sort of meditative state,” she says. “I was listening to all the music the band had sent me, and I was on the treadmill and these words came to me. And I got off the treadmill. I said to Billy [Bush], my husband, who also happens to be the group engineer, ‘I’ve got an idea for this. Let me put this down.’ And he set up my mic and I was sitting on my bed in my pajamas, and I recorded it. And I turned around to look at him, and I was like, ‘Is this is this usable?’ And he was like, ‘It’s great!’ And then I sent it to the boys and I said something along the lines of, ‘OK, I don’t know how you’re going to take this. But this is what I came up with. It’s a bit bonkers.’ And then Steve wrote back: ‘No, it’s great!’ So, it never got re-sung. There’s a certain fragility in the vocal which I think we all loved, and we just decided to keep it as it was.”
“It came back to us basically completely finished, and it was just stunning how complete and beautiful it was,” recalls Marker. “We were shocked.”
“When Shirley had to have her operation, and then her second operation, it’s scary because as a band, we don’t know if we’re going to continue moving forward,” Vig reflects. “Because [she was] all by [herself] sitting in a bed, and we’re all thinking to ourselves, ‘Can we keep doing this? Can we keep going on? Can we keep making music?’ We can’t take it for granted that this will just keep rolling forever, at this point in our career. And so, I think it adds some extra gravity to the songs, in a way, that we know what a struggle it is sometimes to create music. … It sort of gave us this affirmation that what we do is important to us, so we need to grasp it and try and keep engaging it, because it could go away like that. I think when you’re younger, you don’t really care about that. You have no idea of mortality, about how long things last. The longer you’re around, the more you realize how precious it is that you have this gift to be able to create together.”
And now, after 30 years, Vig says Garbage are “very grateful that we have made another album,” and Manson admits, “I think we all are kind of shocked that we enjoy this career at the level that we do. It’s wild. It’s absolutely wild.” As a band that has sold more than 17 million records, recorded a James Bond theme, and been nominated for seven Grammys and 11 MTV Video Music Awards, Garbage are in the rare and enviable position of no longer having to chase hits or radio airplay — which wasn’t always the case when they were feeling the pressure to maintain the momentum of their first two hit ‘90s albums. The octopus is now free to spread its creative tentacles, so to speak, in any direction.
“I think we’ve always tried to make each record pretty distinctly different from the one before it — maybe to our detriment, because we could have just sort of redone what we did on the first record, or the first two records, ad nauseum, and record companies certainly would have been more happy. And radio would have been happy about that,” says Marker. “With [2001’s] Beautiful Garbage, we went off on some really kind of different tangents that people didn’t expect, and sometimes that really threw people off. But I think it’s been a goal to keep ourselves interested in what we’re doing. To just repeat things for the sake of repeating things would have been boring to us, and we’ve always tried to avoid that.”
“After our fourth album, [2005’s] Bleed Like Me, we went on a [seven-year] hiatus, and part of that was because we were tired, burned out, and part of it was we started to feel sort of beaten down by the feedback we were getting — not at all from our fans, but from the music industry — like maybe our time had passed,” admits Vig. “Taking that hiatus re-energized us a lot, and I think that allowed us to refocus on making music and just doing whatever we want. We understand that we’re not going to get played at top 40 radio, and that’s fine by us. … I feel like when we finished No Gods No Masters, we realized as a band that we don’t necessarily have to try and write pop songs to compete in the marketplace or the culture, and that has liberated us.”
“I felt really trapped by this ludicrous idea of what a ‘pop song’ is supposed to be,” adds Manson. “I wanted as a creative person to try and explore more ambitious songwriting [on Let All That We Imagine Be the Light] — something that sounds really unique to us and not reminiscent of pop music that has dominated radio for so long. You know, we are an alternative rock band for a reason. I don’t think we really want to adhere to necessarily all the rules that exist for pop acts today. To get on the radio, you have to sound a certain way. You have to hit a certain algorithm to get onto Spotify playlists ad infinitum. And we are literally an unprogrammable band. We don’t fit into the algorithm.”
“We are our own unique algorithm,” Vig grins.
photo: Joseph Cultice
While Garbage had to cancel their previous world tour because of Manson’s hip surgeries, they’re hitting the road again to support Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, on what will be their first major headlining tour in almost 10 years. It’s called the Happy Endings Tour, but despite its title — or Manson’s quip, “We’ll see how we get on; we might break up!” — it’s not a farewell trek. But there is special meaning behind the name.
“After you’ve gone through something so violent and stuck in your bed basically for almost two years, you realize every single tour at this point could be our last tour. We are old. We were old when we started. We’re old now. And every time though that we leave a country, I think to myself, ‘I might never get back here.’ And that’s not pessimism, it’s not miserable-ism, it’s just reality,” Manson states. “Like, we are so lucky. This is all four original members of this band. It is really rare that we are all still here together. This is remarkable. It’s kind of a miracle. It’s something that could be taken from us in a nanosecond. I think it’s important to remember that, so that you can invest in your own gratitude and realize just how fucking lucky we are. We get to go out into the world as a rock band — an alternative rock band — and play all over the world and put records out. And people listen to them. That is an extraordinary gift.
“And,” Manson adds with a sly smile, “we all love a happy ending.”
