photo: Joseph Cultice
“Wait a fucking minute,” Shirley Manson snarls on “Chinese Fire Horse,” the most fiery and fuming track on Garbage’s eighth electrogoth opus, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light. “You say my time is over/That I have gotten old/That I no longer do it for you/And my face now leaves you cold/You say I’m looking heavy/And I have lost my mind/That I should do the right thing by everybody/And I should just retire.”
The lyrics are a “rebuke” inspired by Manson’s unfortunate real-life experiences during the press cycle for Garbage’s previous album, 2021’s No Gods No Monsters, when the iconic frontwoman was repeatedly, ridiculously asked if she was planning to quit music… at the ripe old age of 54. But Manson, in her typical badass manner, puts those ageist journalists in their place on “Chinese Fire Horse,” as she triumphantly hisses: “Who are you talking to?/You must be mistaken, or you are drunk/And failed to read the room/Yeah, I may be much older, so much older/Yeah, yeah so much older than you/But I’ve still got my power in my brain and my body/I’ll take no shit from you.”
“I just thought it was absolutely outrageous, asking a 54-year-old artist, a female artist, when she was going to retire — on day one of the promotion of a brand-new record,” Manson, now age 58, grumbles. “If I was a male in my position, I would still be seen as vibrant and vigorous and something to invest in; instead, I’m doing interview after interview where people ask me when I’m going to retire, and I literally have to stop the journalists and say, ‘Hey, you wouldn’t be speaking to a male counterpart like this.’ I mean, nobody has ever said that to my bandmates, and they’re considerably older than I am. [Garbage’s Butch Vig, Steve Marker, and Duke Erikson are currently 69, 66, and 74 years old, respectively.] It really stuck with me. … So, that story comes tumbling out in this song, and it is absolutely a complete, rebellious thing: a finger-up song of defiance.”
Many female celebrities seem to feel ashamed or secretive about their age; in fact, Manson’s unapologetic outspokenness is so uncommon that an interview she did with me about aging shortly after her landmark 50th birthday is still going viral, in the Instagram clip below, years later. But while her refreshing messaging clearly resonates, particularly among the Gen X and millennial female fans who grew up with Garbage, Manson admits, “I know a lot of people are fed-up of hearing me talk like this. People don’t like it when I talk about it. People get really uncomfortable, upset. People hate when you talk about age. People freak out. You can gauge where anybody is in their life by the way they react to the statement ‘I’m old.’ Just say it to somebody, and you’ll see the reaction play out. It’s fascinating.”
Case in point: During this latest chat, after Manson freely refers herself as an “old woman,” she gently scolds me when I reflexively feel the need to correct her, or when I give her — without even realizing it — what she describes as a “pitying look,” because I assume that she is putting herself down. “I am rad, and I am old, and these two things can coexist,” she interjects. “I guess that’s my point. I think so much is made of our age, and I don’t think it’s good for anyone to hear this nonsense. You can continue on holding your agency as a human being.
“Things are not easy for old women in the music industry. I don’t like how women are still expected somehow to appeal to some bizarre adolescent fantasy, and there’s not a lot in the history of pop music that deals with this kind of subject matter. Rock ‘n’ roll was designed by men for men, and we still hold on to these old-fashioned ideas that women are really merely here to entertain men and to titillate men. And I just don’t believe that’s the case. I’m kind of fed-up with it,” Manson continues. “But I am lucky in that I’m part of what I call the ‘second wave.’ The first wave of female rockers like Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Stevie Nicks, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, all of these amazing women, have shown women all over the world that they too can have a career into their seventies and eighties. That is the first time we’ve ever seen that in the whole wide world. That is remarkable, and it’s inspiring to me. I feel like rock ‘n’ roll has evolved, and in the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll comes more female voices talking about the female experience, which is still relatively unexplored. That’s exciting to me, and as a result, I feel fearless about my age. So, if some fucking journalist or some fan in the street thinks I’m old and over, I don’t give a fucking fuck.”
photo: Javi Garcia-Huidobro
Incredibly, and infuriatingly, Manson was already experiencing this ageism, even some internalized ageism, when Garbage started out 30 years ago and she was a bit older than her female peers. And back then, she wasn’t so at peace with the idea of growing older. “Women are encouraged by the age of, let’s see, their late twenties to believe they’re old, and they’re taught that they lose their agency. They are taught that they’re old and over before they’ve even hit 30. The first sign of a wrinkle seems to disempower a lot of women. They freak out. And I think it’s absolutely ludicrous. I’m so tired of it,” sighs Manson. “So, I definitely struggled, particularly at the beginning of my career, with my age. Because I knew that I was coming into ‘pop music,’ for want of a better expression, at the age of 28, which was considered way ‘over the hill’ back then. … I tortured myself about my age. I tortured myself about wrinkles and my body and my imagined decrepitude. Looking back on it now, I see photographs of myself at the beginning of my career, and I look like a child! Basically, I look like a baby. But I felt like I looked old and over. So, I guess I talk about this a lot because I know it’s an issue for a lot of women, and I want young women in particular to not fall into the traps that I did. I don’t want them the same traps to be set for them. So, here we are.”
photo courtesy of Garbage
Ironically, it was during the making of Let All That We Imagine Be the Light that Manson started feeling a real sense of her own morality, or at least her own fragility, when she had to undergo two hip-replacement surgeries stemming from injuries she sustained when she “fucking fell off the stage and nearly fucking broke my neck” at the 2016 KROQ Weenie Roast. “I was in a lot of pain and I was bruised up, but I didn’t really think too much about it,” Manson says of that incident, admitting she was more embarrassed than anything else, because “the footage was everywhere, and of course people love it when you fall and you’re seen as being humiliated. People love that shit.” But years later, the pain “became so bad, so crippling, that I had to get it fixed.” And then she felt especially humiliated.
“It’s weird, because I’m quite tough. I’ve been physically blessed my whole life,” Manson muses. “I hadn’t ever been in the hospital or anything up to this point. And I did shake off like my hip injury. We had a long tour ahead of us and I had to ignore it. And so, I just ignored it until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. … And then I was embarrassed when I had my first hip replacement, going around Beverly Hills outside my doctor’s office in sweatpants with a walker. I kept saying to my husband, ‘Please, God, sweet Jesus, please don’t let me bump into anyone who recognizes me or takes a photograph of me!’ … But then I started to realize, ‘This is ridiculous that I’m feeling embarrassed. It’s cool! Like, I’m the Bionic Woman!’ I’d wanted to be Lindsay Wagner my whole life. So, I was over the shame of it.”
But then, in the summer of 2024, in the middle of a world tour, Manson suddenly needed a second, unexpected bionic hip. “I thought everything was fine, going along just dandy, and then my other hip, the healthy hip — what I thought was the healthy hip — just completely gave out on me,” she recalls. “We [were about to play] Wembley Arena in London, which was our biggest show in the U.K. since our heyday in the ‘90s. It was a big deal for us, and we were all very excited. And I woke up on the day of the show and I couldn’t walk. I literally couldn’t hold myself up. I was freaking out. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the gig. Somehow I did, which speaks to my own personal, special kind of madness. And then the next day, I was in a wheelchair being wheeled to Heathrow Airport on the way home. It was unbelievable.”
Manson ended up being “on a lot of painkillers for the duration of making” of Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, even singing “I found God in Tramadol” on “The Day That I Met God,” a track she recorded in her pajamas, in bed, while “literally out of my mind on painkillers. … It was about as fragile as I ever get. I felt very, very broken down,” Manson reflects. “Like, when you really break your body and you can’t walk and you’re using wheelchairs, you’re using walking sticks, you’re using walking frames, it’s really, really devastating. It’s shocking. It really gave me an insight into what disabled people have to live with. And I just couldn’t imagine ever getting strong again. It felt so far away from me. I really felt in despair. I was really brutally depressed. But making music makes you feel better. It makes you feel like, ‘Oh, I’m alive and I’ve got fire.’ And that’s a great feeling.”
Making Let All That We Imagine Be the Light was motivating in Manson’s recovery, but she confesses, “I’m not entirely sure how I recovered my equilibrium after having these two major surgeries. I just felt so old and over and broken and fragile and vulnerable and scared. But then you start doing rehab and little by little you gain strength again, and it’s actually a somewhat thrilling experience that I’m really grateful I went through. I’m really thrilled by what it taught me, what it opened my eyes to. It was exciting. It still feels exciting to recover from something like that. It feels powerful. And I realized that you can be vigorous in life in many different ways. You don’t have to be the version of yourself you once were. You can adapt and you can grow, and especially as an artist, you can explore what it means to be a human being. And people can enjoy that ride with you. People are so relieved to hear someone talk about things that remain taboo, you know? And if you give voice to your own fears, somebody else finds relief in that. And then you realize you’re in service to people. I think when I first started out in the band, I was all about showing off. I was a party girl. I came up through the clubs. I thought it was all about just entertainment. But then as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to realize, actually, that artists are in service. We’re here to serve other people.”
And so, no, Manson is not planning to retire any time soon; in fact, Garbage are about to embark on their biggest headlining tour in a decade, with one of the many young badass female artists that Manson has undoubtedly inspired, frontwoman Arrow de Wilde, opening the shows with L.A. garage-rock band Starcrawler.
“I’m going to do what I want to do in my life until I can do it no longer. And until that point, everyone can go to hell,” Manson declares with a chuckle and a shrug. “As I’ve gotten older, I realize that the more you expand, as uncomfortable as that is, it allows everybody else to expand around you. I think that particularly for young women, but this applies to young men too, is you’re taught you just need to stay within these little lines that are drawn for you. You earn and you raise a family and you get your gold watch at fucking 65 years old, and then you go off and play golf. It’s the same for women: You have children, you be a nice pretty girl until you’re not anymore, and then you disappear and fuck off. And all I’m saying is, there is so much more out there for all of us. We have to believe it’s out there. And once we believe it’s out there, it’s there for the taking. You can be as big as you want to be, or you can be as quiet and small as you want to be, but at least we all have the choice now.
“I feel like I’m just get started, because I’m just starting to get clear about what my job is now at the grand old age of 58, eight albums in with this band. It’s a long career to just suddenly start to understand,” Manson concludes. “I think the older you get, you’re reaching more and more for these big answers to these big questions. I didn’t have them when I was young. I was too busy doing other things — fucking the man I wanted to fuck, getting a job, buying my first house, adopting a dog. All these things that make up your life. You’re too busy in your life, you’re having fun, and then you get to a certain point in your life when you realize, ‘Oh my God, I’ve gotten to the top of the hillside and now I’m on my way down. How am I going to make my life meaningful, exciting, creative, joyful, adventurous?’ To be able to do that in your life as you get older and your body starts to feel [older] but your mind is still powerful… for me, I find that thrilling. It’s exciting. This is a way of giving meaning to my old age.”
