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.”

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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.”

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.”

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“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.”

Shirley Manson, left, and Anna Bulbrook at Girlschool 2017. (Photo: Facebook)

As the third annual Girlschool festival takes place in Los Angeles this weekend, its voices — which this year include Garbage’s Shirley Manson with the Girlschool Choir, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein in conversation with poet Morgan Parker, Pussy Riot-affiliated rapper Desi Mo, and the Dum Dum Girls’ Kristin Kontrol — are needed now more than ever. Following a disappointing Grammys, at which few women won any actual awards and Recording Academy president Neil Portnow controversially placed the blame on female artists, telling women they need to “step up” — Girlschool provides a sense of community “for women that don’t get the opportunity to be heard on mainstream media outlets and platforms,” Manson tells Yahoo Entertainment. “You don’t hear these voices very much at all in our culture currently. That’s what I think’s so magical about Girlschool.”

The Girlschool artistic collective was founded by Anna Bulbrook of the Airborne Toxic Event (a classically trained violinist who’s also played with Kanye West, Beyoncé, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and Vampire Weekend) to “celebrate, connect, and lift women-identified artists, leaders, and voices.” Speaking with Yahoo about this year’s event in a candid roundtable with Manson (who was last year’s Girlschool keynote speaker), the conversation gets heavy at times, but Bullbrook can’t suppress her giddy excitement over this year’s Girlschool lineup. “It’s going to be unmissable, and if you miss it, you will probably have FOMO for the rest of your life,” she enthuses. “Everybody deserves a chance to be heard, but also everybody’s so good, you’re going to want to hear them.”

Read on for Bulbrook and Manson’s thoughts on gender equality and inclusivity in music, the Time’s Up movement, why the progress that women made in the ’90s frustratingly stalled, their hopes for the future, and the power of “positive discrimination.”

Yahoo Entertainment: Shirley, how did you come to be a part of Girlschool?

Shirley Manson: I just really admired what Anna was doing, and I felt it was really vital what she was doing at that particular time. As time has unfolded since we connected, I couldn’t be more right. The need for the kind of advocacy that Anna’s doing is more vital than ever. I was really inspired when I met her, and I’ve stalked her on social media ever since, and been blown away by how much she actually does. We’re all guilty of talking a lot, just saying, “I’m supporting and doing this and doing that,” but Anna has been able to do things for other people, and I really respect that.

Yahoo Entertainment: Anna, why did you decide to start Girlschool? Did your own experience as a musician in a male-dominated field make you want to take action?

Anna Bulbrook: Yes. I think especially in the wake of this [USC] study [about the lack of representation of women in music] that was just released this week; we’ve all seen the statistics, which very much confirm my experience — our experiences as the female members of the bands that we’ve been in, and coming from the rock space. It’s a very lonely position to be in. … It wasn’t until probably eight years that I started to really notice and miss the company of other women. I had this perspective-shifting experience with Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls L.A. I was a speaker, and it was the first time I’ve ever been in a space that was 100 percent women-identified people coming together in an intentionally positive way around making music. I’d never had that experience. After that experience, I was so hungry for more of that. I couldn’t unsee what I had seen, and I couldn’t exist without it going forward.

I’m actually really excited that we actually have hard data now that we can point to and say, “This is a problem, look. We’re not just making it up. There really is this incredible disparity.” What would music sound like if it were more inclusive? What would happen if all the incredible women producers that I know were actually given a chance to make a record, or someone would take a chance on them with a budget? What would happen if songwriters were women too? What would music sound like? It’s very exciting to have truth and have facts that we can look at, that we can actually assess where we are, then keep working towards a beautiful, brighter future — look back at the numbers and see if you’ve measurably moved the needle.

Manson: Statistics are really depressing. We all know that that’s not because women aren’t great musicians. There’s something amiss here. I guess we’re all trying to struggle to figure out why this is the case, whether it’s that women don’t have the confidence necessarily to push themselves into the spotlight, or whether they’ve not been given the chance to stand in the spotlight. I think there are multiple reasons why women are not engaged in music in the same way as their male counterparts. That has to change, and I think what Anna is doing, it’s positively trying to change how women view themselves and to give them this confidence and joy — the joy that you get from playing music.

Yahoo Entertainment: The ’90s, an era when Garbage came to prominence, is a decade I look back on fondly. At that time, it seemed like the issues we’re discussing now were in the process of being erased. So many bands that I like were coed, or all-women bands, or female-fronted. Lilith Fair, Alanis Morissette, Riot Grrrl, Courtney Love, the Breeders, Liz Phair — the list goes on. Then I feel like everything regressed, or it stopped. Do you have any thoughts as to why that progress didn’t continue?

Manson: I’ve been saying this for years now. I think when Sept. 11 occurred, it not only was a horrendous tragedy, but it affected the culture and it affected American radio programming. All of a sudden, everybody in the world felt really unsafe in ways that we had never ever felt before. As a result, humanity gets conservative. When humanity feels under attack, when it feels threatened, it gets conservative, and nobody wants a woman with opinions, or an aggressive woman, or a powerful woman, at times when white men are feeling under threat. It’s oversimplifying it to put it like that, but I do essentially believe that that is what was at play. Like you say, everything was on this amazing trajectory, and then all of a sudden it was like the car turned around and headed back down the road. It’s never changed direction since. It’s really rather frightening and really disheartening because when we emerged in the ’90s, it really felt like women were piercing through the glass ceiling. In some ways we definitely were, but unfortunately, that change has not continued.

You mentioned Lilith Fair. I didn’t want to participate in Lilith Fair. By the time we were invited to go on that tour, I didn’t want to do a fully female-oriented festival. It was against everything I believed in. But now I feel like it’s necessary for me to put my weight behind women’s interests. I feel like that because the times have changed. The climate’s different, and I think it’s a matter of urgency for women to galvanize.

Yahoo Entertainment: That is an interesting point, actually, because there is a mindset that sometimes doing things that are solely all about being women, whether it’s Lilith Fair or the She Rocks Awards, or even Girlschool, it’s making women be “other,” putting them off in a little side category.

Bulbrook: Actually, Shirley and I were talking about this. As two women in bands that have had some levels of success, we don’t have that many peers. I would say just from my experience being out there in the professional landscape, life got very lonely. So just the experience of seeing so many women-identified people as artists, technical people, and speakers in one place, it’s so exciting. I think that is the intention behind a lot of girls’ groups: When there’s a lot of really amazing people together who feel some kind of kinship with each other, that feeling of community feels very enriching. And I think if you do it in a way that is inclusive and includes everybody on the gender spectrum — and that includes men — then you’re creating something really beautiful, exciting, and positive. It involves the whole community. I do agree that if you completely separate yourself, it’s not as effective as it could be.

Manson: I think when I was younger, I guess I didn’t believe in “positive discrimination,” and now as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized we will never break the mold and the old patriarchy unless we do recognize that women of all colors are not as privileged as men of all colors. There has to be some way that we break that. A lot of people point at positive discrimination and say, “This isn’t cool.” I was guilty of that myself when I was younger. But the political climate is such and the actual statistics are such that I really feel that positive discrimination is the only way we will actually change the course.

Bulbrook: I tend to think this about feminism in general, but I think it has to be inclusive and representative across the board: color, identity, religion, ability. I feel like it’s really incredibly important to make sure that if we want to move forward, we do it together, and we do it from a very intentional and considered way. I feel like any effort which just is one group of people, one type of woman, so to speak, misses the point entirely.

Yahoo Entertainment: At Girlschool last year, there was a panel discussion about sexual harassment in the music business. This was well before harassment became the topic of national discussion that it is now.

Bulbrook: I think these things go in cycles in the media. I am heartened to see so many people engaging with it, and I hope that the process of building a big cultural moment actually results in people teaching our children how to be better people, people teaching their children about equality, people teaching their children about consent and what it means to be a good person, no matter what your gender is. I really hope that we see some change from this, but I think to be a woman in the world is to engage with the constant fear of sexual harassment and the fear of sexual assault. … I would love to see a world that feels like Girlschool, where when you’re there, you actually don’t have to worry about that for a little while.

Yahoo Entertainment: Sometimes I do worry that #MeToo and Time’s Up will be seen as some “hot new trend” — meaning, the media will get tired of reporting about it, or people will be tired of reading about it, just because there’s been such a media saturation for the last six months or so. I almost fear people will fatigue of these stories and then not take them seriously anymore.

Manson: I feel a little concerned too, that people’s ears just start to shut down and get bored and move on to another topic. But I do agree with Anna. I feel like the conversation is being had and it is a really significant cultural moment, and it’s on everybody’s lips. I think that will affect a generation of men and women — or everyone on the spectrum, let’s say. I think it’s never going to change people who have serious sexual problems. There’s always going to be predators out there, and they will prey on anyone. No amount of discussion and no amount of analysis will ever change that; some people are sick in the head, and that’s just how it goes. But I do think it will give pause to the average [man of] power and privilege that thinks he can just take what he wants, when he wants, without consequence. I do think that’s one of the greatest things that we’ll take from this moment in time.

Above all things, we must encourage people to speak out, and continue to speak out. It’s about using your voice. If you don’t use your voice, you’re eradicated by history. That’s just how it’s always been. You must be a witness to your own experience. And at this time when we’re all so busy broadcasting, we really all need to stop and listen, and actually pay attention, and see, and hear, and try, and reeducate our children. A lot of it’s about education. It’s about teaching people what is right and what is wrong, what’s appropriate and what’s not.

Yahoo Entertainment: Do either of you have any stories about how you’ve been discriminated against, or just in general treated differently, poorly, because of your gender?

Bulbrook:  Well, I think the insidious thing about bias is sometimes it’s hard to see it. I think it’s hard to even know when it’s happening to you, because we’re all biased. The sad thing is, everybody is biased against women — including other women. We might just look at two people, two different candidates for something, and think one is just worse for some reason. We don’t know why, but one happens to be the woman-identified candidate. It blew my mind when I actually started understanding the idea of bias and looked around. I started to see it everywhere — in myself, in others, in experiences I’ve had. I look backwards with a whole new pair of glasses and can see all of these colors I’ve never seen before.

I’ve had those very obvious experiences where the label executive suggested I wear a see-through skirt in New York City for a photo shoot. This was the head of the label, who holds the purse-strings for the marketing budget. Some members of my band were like, “Don’t do that. You’re going to be uncomfortable.” I was like, “Really? You want me to show my butt?” Some of that stuff happens, but I feel like more often than not, because I was with really good people, the way it plays out is much more subtle and hard to notice, unless you actually open your eyes to it. I know Shirley’s had some other experiences.

Manson: I feel like it happens to women every day, in really subtle ways. As Anna said so rightly, often you can be slow yourself to detect it, to have a clarity about what has happened. You’re not always aware of that when all the male record execs are commenting on your hairstyle. It’s only a few years later that I’m thinking, “What the f***? What’s my hair got to do with you? You wouldn’t be talking about a male artist in this way!” I was an object. I was too young, and too naïve, and too vain to really detect it at the time, but now looking back, I’m like, “That was just ridiculous.” More than that, I think in business I have just been completely ignored a lot of the time by male lawyers, and managers, and business managers. Everything’s directed towards my male counterparts. They would talk to me maybe about what shoes I wanted to wear. It continues to this day.

Yahoo Entertainment: How did you handle that, especially when you were first starting out?

Manson: I’m very aware that during the very first part of my career, I played submissive dog all the time. I wouldn’t come into a work situation and say, “This hi-hat doesn’t sound good to me.” I would fudge the margins and deliberately dumb myself down, use simple language and try not to be threatening. I would never take ownership over any directive. I knew that if I didn’t act like a submissive dog, I wouldn’t get what I wanted. Men don’t have to do that; women continue to have to do that often. You’ll see it in a lot of female execs. They’re very fun, and energetic. I feel that that’s methodology to get what they want, but men can be as grumpy and unpleasant as they wish and nobody has a word to say about it. If a woman acts that way, she’s a c***, literally. She’s a “bossy c***.”

Yahoo Entertainment: It’s interesting to talk about this stuff, because the recent onslaught of media headlines is definitely more focused on the crazy, shocking, violent stories. But these stories you’re telling now are also important. I think it’s important to talk about how incidents that maybe don’t seem nearly as dramatic, or traumatic, also take their toll.

Bulbrook: I’m hoping that Girlschool can create a really warm, engaging, and high-quality story around this incredible talent and create enough of a conduit so that we can start catapulting more artists who are already here. The industry is full of talented women who are working in the music space in some capacity. Let’s start pushing them into opportunities out in the mainstream, and let’s start pushing them and giving them the experience they need to go get a paying job. Let’s create jobs for them, so then they have the experience at a high level where someone finds them undeniable. If you can create this positive and action-oriented space, it’s also just really fun to be a part of. I’m hopeful about where we can go with things in the future. This is really positive for all of us who are involved in it.

Yahoo Entertainment: I love the idea of community, because you touched on something interesting: women sometimes being biased against other women. I think that is such a shame.

Bulbrook: I feel like, yes, there’s bias, but it is a myth that women don’t support each other. I think when given the opportunity, we do. It’s magic, it’s incredible. I can’t feel anything other than hopeful, because of what I see every day in my personal experience and work. I see too many good things that happen when women come together to believe that we’re not supportive of each other.

Manson: Well, I have to disagree and agree. I’ve been on the receiving end of both situations. I’ve enjoyed phenomenal support from incredible women, and I’ve also seen the panicked, fearful, defensive approach by a lot of other female artists who never, ever seem interested in supporting or speaking out on behalf of another female artist. I think ultimately it speaks of the way our culture is, which is all based on fear of lack of opportunity. For women in general who are getting less opportunity than their white male counterparts, I think they feel if one woman flourishes, automatically all the other women in the room don’t. Of course, I don’t believe that’s the case at all, and until women really support the women they see flourishing, we’ll never change the lack of opportunities. Similarly, white women have to get the backs of their black sisters and women of color. We all have to start recognizing how can we break down the system that we are currently oppressed under. These are big words and it sounds dramatic — but I think it is quite dramatic, really.

I think, again, it goes back to education. We need to educate our children differently. We’re still teaching them that girls do housework and boys get to run out and get dirty in the yard. It’s just crazy that these stereotypes still exist. We have yet to really break that down. I just feel like boys are encouraged to take up room, and girls are encouraged to make themselves small. Boys are encouraged to be loud and boisterous; girls are supposed to be ladylike and quiet. I think all these things are what lead to these weird imbalances in our culture, and it has to change. This is not good for anyone. Yes, particularly in the arts, you’ll find pockets of incredibly supportive women collectives and movements, but out in the world at large I don’t see a lot of support from women for other women. I see a lot of bitchiness, criticism, judgments, and snickering behind girls’ backs. I don’t know, that’s just my perception of the world. I’ve worked with men a lot in my career, and men are much more forgiving to themselves and to each other. Women are really unforgiving of themselves and each other. These are sweeping statements, and it’s not by any means a rule of thumb, but that’s what I’ve witnessed in my life.

Yahoo Entertainment: How do you see what’s going on musically now — especially as it pertains to women-identified artists — reflecting what’s going on politically, culturally? And where is that going?

Bulbrook: I’m just so deep in this festival coming up, and I’m just excited about what we have around us. I’m enthralled with how much different talent there is. I’m excited to see what happens when we get all those different people together under one roof, bringing different audiences together. I feel what’s happening, especially with people ages 15 to 25 these days, around gender and unboxing these gender types and creating a bit more freedom within everything. I feel so hopeful. I know that history and statistics show that maybe I shouldn’t be hopeful, because it’s really hard to make a change, but I have to believe in a better future — because if I didn’t, what would I work towards?

Manson: I also feel really optimistic, and I feel that there’s a whole new wave of really provocative, smart, informed women making music that’s much more rebellious/provocative than the last 20, 15 years. I feel like there’s a real upswell from women who have something to say, who are not interested in putting on a leotard and singing pop music. Now, that is a huge shift, because certainly 10 years ago, that’s all you saw: girls wanting to be pretty. They were all wearing long nails painted glamorously, they were all very ladylike, and they were all singing pop songs either about having a great time in a club, falling in love, having their hearts broken, or being forever young. Things have definitely shifted.

I feel like we have had 20 years of forceful women being pushed back; now the women are roaring back in a massive way. And I do feel that that will then, again, push women’s rights and women’s fortunes forward. Let’s face it, I have a better life than my mum did. My mum didn’t get to choose what she did for a living. My mum basically would keep house, and get a f***ing allowance from my father. I grew up in a very conservative household, and my granny also didn’t have freedom. And neither did her mother before her. I do believe in the concept of evolution really strongly. When I talk to young women now, they’re way smarter than I ever was. So, I just have to believe that the next generation are going to continue that. Human nature is going to continue to evolve, and everything’s going to be OK in the end.

Girlschool takes place Feb. 2-4 at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles. Click here for tickets and the full lineup.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

As Garbage members reflect on their 20-plus years as a band and their new retrospective coffee table book, This Is the Noise That Keeps Me Awake, one career highlight that quickly comes to mind is the 1999 Grammy Awards, when Garbage were up for Album of the Year. Frontwoman and fashion icon Shirley Manson commemorated the occasion by wearing a bold dress emblazoned with the artwork of Garbage’s nominated sophomore effort, Version 2.0, but she realized too late that the album’s cover art didn’t totally cover up her body.

Shirley Manson at the 1999 Grammys (Photo: Getty Images)

“This sounds like a lie, but this is the God’s honest truth: I had zero idea it was see-through,” Manson says now of the infamous outfit. “I look at photos now and go, ‘I turned up for the Grammys in that?’ It’s just like, Jesus Christ, what was I thinking? I was just fixated on the fact that I thought it was really smart to advertise our record on the Grammy red carpet, because I think we knew that we were never going to end up on the red carpet again with Album of the Year. I had no idea.”

“It was a striking dress,” chuckles Garbage drummer/producer Butch Vig, sitting with Manson at Yahoo Music for their career-spanning Backspin interview. “I remember [bassist] Duke [Erikson] and [guitarist] Steve [Marker] and I, we didn’t want to question your choice, your fashion choices. It’s like, ‘She’s wearing that dress. Yeah.’”

“But nobody mentioned it to me!” Manson exclaims. “Not one person said, ‘Shirl, you might want to put on a flesh-colored bra…’”

Garbage have always defied the odds. Manson’s first audition for the supergroup (in Vig’s Manson-described “man cave” in Madison, Wis., far away from the Scotswoman’s native land) was by all accounts a disaster, but she still landed the job — and then took a major risk by relocating to the States to join a group with virtual strangers and stay in a Shining-esque hotel. (“I wouldn’t recommend the way our band came together to any other young woman traveling from Scotland to Madison with no money in her pocket, no way of really getting home, no way of touching base. I wouldn’t recommend that for anyone, but I was very lucky that they weren’t creeps. They could’ve easily been creeps, at least one of them could have been a weirdo, but they were really great,” Manson says.)

Even when Vig, fresh off his historic production work on Nirvana’s Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, was assembling Garbage, he says, “a lot of people started telling me, ‘Man, you made a big mistake doing a record with a band. You’ve just became a very successful producer, and if the record flops, it could be the end of your career.” And when Vig and company opted to experiment with electronic sounds instead of the expected guitar-based grunge, there was a fan backlash at first.

So after all that, it’s understandable that Manson was astounded that Garbage had been nominated for Album of the Year against heavy hitters like Madonna, Shania Twain, Sheryl Crow, and eventual winner Lauryn Hill. “Just to have gotten to that point in our career, so quickly, was really an extraordinary, bizarre moment — where the underdogs suddenly found themselves sniffing around the studs,” Manson marvels.

This was a “phenomenally happy” time for Garbage; as Vig says, “It was a hell of a party!” Following the surprise double-platinum success of their 1995 self-titled debut, while making Version 2.0 the band spent $200,000 in their local watering hotel (actually more than they spent on the album recording itself), and spent a whopping $750,000 on their VMA-nominated “Push It” video. (“Oh, God bless the ’90s!” Manson laughs now.) But the party couldn’t last; and eventually, struggles with Garbage’s record label, within the band, and in the members’ personal lives took a toll.

The first sign of trouble came when Garbage were asked to record the James Bond theme for The World Is Not Enough — a massive honor for any artist — but then everything went wrong when the band’s flight to the L.A. film premiere was canceled, forcing them to catch a public screening that night in their layover city of Pittsburgh. Then, to make matters worse, they watched in horror as the opening credits rolled and they realized the song had been radically tweaked in postproduction. “We went to a commercial cinema to watch it on our own, and we got our hopes and joys squashed,” says Manson. “Because the theme comes on and we’re really excited and we’re sitting on the edge of our seats — like, ‘Oh my God, we’ve just done a Bond theme!’ — and they had completely screwed with all the stems of mix and it sounded completely different. We were like deflated balloons, sitting in our seats. We’d gone from primed and awake to slumped and depressed.” Manson says this was Garbage’s “first taste of getting rogered” by the showbiz machine.

What followed was Garbage’s “annus horribilis,” 2001–2002. Manson was going through a divorce from her first husband, Scottish sculptor Eddie Farrell, and was constantly squabbling in the studio with Erikson. Then, the group’s third album, Beautiful Garbage, came out right around the time of 9/11 and got lost in the shuffle. When the band finally hit the road, Vig came down with Hepatitis A, followed by Bell’s palsy, and he had to quit the tour.

“Our record sales were diving into the toilet. That causes a lot of tension in a band. You just can’t help it. Nobody feels good. Everybody feels like a loser. Everybody’s worried,” says Manson. “So it was a very, very taxing, sad time for everyone, and we were unable, really, to talk about it because we were so busy. It took us a long time, through into our next record cycle, to even start addressing the problems that had arisen from, basically, our career collapse.”

Those tensions bled into the making of Bleed Like Me, as the band felt pressure from their label to re-create the success of their first two albums. The result was Garbage’s “darkest hour.” Vig, usually the “peacemaker” of the band, finally got so fed up with Manson and Erikson’s ongoing drama that he temporarily bailed on the Bleed Like Me recording sessions and flew to Los Angeles. (“I was like, ‘I’m free!’ I just felt like this gigantic monkey on my back had just fallen off. We didn’t even talk to each other for, I don’t know, a couple months or so,” Vig recalls.) Eventually, Garbage finished the difficult fourth album and resumed touring, but while in Australia, “we just pulled the plug,” says Manson. “Then we didn’t see each other for seven years.”

Ironically, it was more tragedy and strife that eventually brought the band back together. Manson had pretty much retired from music after her mother’s terminal 18-month battle with dementia (“To watch my mother basically slip away was excruciating”), but another series of horrible events — including the sudden death of her best friend’s young husband and the cancer death of another friend’s 6-year-old son — “knocked some sense into me,” Manson explains. “I just continued to grow up, I think, and any sort of bad feelings toward the band just evaporated. I yearned, actually, to be with them, because I really missed them.”

It was the death of 6-year-old Pablo Castelaz (son of music-business veteran Jeff Castelaz, who later co-founded the Pablove Foundation) that inspired Manson to sing again and ultimately reunite the band. “[Pablo’s] favorite song was ‘Life on Mars?’ by David Bowie, and I was asked to sing that song at the memorial,” Manson says solemnly. “I went to the memorial, and Butch was there. I don’t know if any of you have ever been witness to your friends losing a child, but there is nothing in this life worse than watching people lose a child. It is, bar none, just the most horrific experience. It was a very tense time and a very sad event. In the middle of all this, I get to sing this beautiful song by an incredible artist, and it brought great pleasure to Pablo’s parents, and it brought me and Butch together at a very emotional time. We saw each other, and Butch was like, ‘Oh, it’s so good to hear you sing.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I miss singing. Why are we not making music?’ Butch was like, ‘I don’t know. Let’s make a record. Let’s see each other. Let’s hang out.’ It sort of started there.”

“We just felt like, life is short, and we have music to make,” Vig adds.

When the four band members reconvened for the first time in seven years, they immediately jelled. (“We were laughing hysterically, like 12-year-olds drunk on cider,” recalls Manson). They went on to found their own record label, Stunvolume, and release two critically heralded comeback albums (2012’s Not Your Kind of People and last year’s Strange Little Birds). And now, with a summer co-headlining tour with their heroes Blondie and the release of This Is the Noise That Keeps Me Awake, their future looks bright again. However, Garbage’s brand-new song “No Horses” still traffics in depressing matter: It is, as Manson describes it, “an imagining into a dark, dystopian future… It’s about this is the road we’re going down [as a society], and how if we continue down this road, this is what we see possibly could happen — and it’s not pretty.”

‘This Is the Noise That Keeps Me Awake,’ by Garbage with Jason Cohen (Photo: Akashic Books)

Manson may joke, when looking back at her daring 1999 Grammy dress, that fans are welcome “to have a look at my beautiful, lovely, young tits,” but now, as a 50-year-old veteran artist reflecting on her long career, she wants to tackle more adult subject matter in her lyrics — as she does on “No Horses.”

“As I get older and older, I feel like the stakes are getting higher and higher,” Manson explains. “Every time I go to write, I want to write something that I’ve never written before, and that nobody else has said before. … I don’t just want to write a pop song anymore. I’m going to leave the pop songs to the kids; that’s what they’re good at. I’m 50. What can I do with my 50-year-old self that hasn’t been done before? That’s what I want to write about. I think that’s interesting.

“I, unlike so much of the world, welcome growing up. I welcome being older and welcome experience. I’m not ashamed of the fact that I’m 50 years old. I’m not trying to sell myself off as some 35-year-old,” Manson elaborates. “I want to say, ‘Yeah, I am an aging woman. This experience is real, and it’s going to happen to everybody.’ … I don’t want to run away from the truth of my life. I know that I’m going to die, so I want to bear witness. I want to put a mark in the sand and say, ‘This is what it was like to be a Scottish woman who was a young ingénue, who grew up, who then aged.’

“When I hear female artists, I feel that a lot of them are trying to run away from their age and trying to still pretend they’re still hot in their leotards,” Manson continues, getting intense. “Of course I understand why women are scared to admit what age they are, but my feeling is that will never change until women change it… It breaks my heart when I see older women make apologies about their age. It breaks my heart. I’m like, ‘Why are you apologizing? You should feel victorious. You’ve survived and you’re still here. You know more than me and you know more than them. You should own that!’ So many women just feel that they’re written off the board because they’re no longer sexy, or they’re no longer the woman that every man in the world’s head is turning to watch walk out the door. All I want women to know is, there’s a lot more out there for you, that will mean more for you in your life, than a man’s head turning to watch you walk out the door.”

In the end, as Manson, Vig, Erikson, and Marker achieve elder-statesmen/stateswoman status, they are at peace with the career they’ve had, with all of its ups and downs. “We didn’t compromise; I think that’s what I’m so grateful for,” asserts Manson. “We didn’t get corrupted by record company pressure and the record company corporate obsession with making money. We actually fought that, and it was difficult, but we’ve come out the other side and we feel unsullied. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, it wasn’t great, and yeah, we got rejected by the mainstream, but I can sleep at night and I feel pure.’ That feels so good. To know that you’re not easily corrupted is really an incredible realization.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

This article originally appeared in the August 2016 issue of ELLE. Read it in its entirety here.

“I don’t know what propelled me,” says founding Garbage front woman Shirley Manson of her new, chic, candy-pink dye job. “I woke up one day and thought, I cannot stay red-haired for one second longer! My hairdresser didn’t want to do it. But I needed a break from myself. When she pulled the towel from my head and I saw my pink hair, I burst into this huge grin and gasped: ‘I look amazing!’ And I’ve never said that about myself in my entire life.”

This is a woman who, since Garbage’s first electro-tinged, trip-hop-traced, self-titled album in 1995, has challenged what it means to rock hard and—with her punky mix of combat boots, acid-bright clothes, and iconic black eyeliner—looked great doing it. She’s the hard-core fighter pilot Queen Astarte in Garbage’s sci-fi hit video “Special.” She has seven Grammy nominations, including Best New Artist in 1997 and Album of the Year in 1999. She’s sold more than 17 million records. She’s kicked open doors for every modern-day pop-rock heroine, from Charli XCX to Karen O. She’s even recorded a Bond theme (1999′s “The World Is Not Enough”)!

But what would Garbage be if Manson—who somehow turns 50 this month—weren’t still tapping into the insecurities that have fueled the group’s most iconically angst-ridden hits? “Sometimes I look in the mirror, feel my shoulders slump, and am disappointed with what I see,” Manson says. “And I have imaginary voices about what people might say about me having pink hair at 50. But I’m at that point where I don’t give a fuck if you think it’s appropriate or not. Go fuck yourself and be boring! I want to be free to explore the person I want to be.”

CONTINUED AT ELLE.COM

photo: Rick Kern/WireImage

It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since Garbage released their (recently reissued) self-titled debut album. And it may be even harder to come to terms with what’s changed in the music industry since Garbage frontgoddess Shirley Manson, she of the red-hot hair and white-hot wit, first emerged on the scene. The mid-’90s were ruled by riot grrrls; female-fronted and coed rock bands (think Hole, No Doubt, Veruca Salt, Sonic Youth, the Breeders); and the Lilith Fair set. Not so much anymore. And while Manson tells Yahoo Music, “From where I sit, I think any time is a good time for women in music,” she admits that the ’90s were “definitely a different era.”

It was the era of The Misfit.

“I love that word, ‘misfit,’” Manson giggles over the phone, as she prepares to play the first night of Garbage’s 20th anniversary tour. “It’s wonderful to be a misfit! Even if we’re all led to believe that it’s not. Right now, the biggest stars we have are female pop stars, and that’s amazing. But what was beautiful for me in the ’90s is we were privileged to the minds of the rebel girls who weren’t conforming to the expected norms of so-called, at the time, female behaviors. You saw all the girls who weren’t playing by the rules. And they had the chance to do mainstream radio. We got onto front covers of magazines and we were always on television, all over the world!

“Don’t get me wrong, there’s so many pop stars [today] that I adore. I’m obsessed with Rihanna and Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. They’re fantastic and I’m not trying to diminish them at all; that’s not my intention,” Manson continues. “I guess what I’m trying to say is all these girls that are successful right now, they were the ‘cheerleaders.’ They were the ones who were the best singers; they had the best bodies. But what was great about the ’90s was that it was all the fragile and f—ed-up people who had their chance to be heard. And they were the ones that ruled the mainstream. I’d say the one commonality between everyone who loves our band is this feeling of not being ‘the winner.’”

It is the always outspoken Manson’s willingness to put her fragility and “f—ed-upness” on display that has made her such a hero and role model to countless alt-rock fans. (“Not a day goes by where I don’t receive a message on Facebook or a tweet or an Instagram message with a fan talking about how our music has pulled them through,” she says proudly.) In many ways, Manson is to Generation X as the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde was to Manson’s era. Manson has gone on the record multiple times about how she worshipped Hynde when she was a troubled, bullied teenager growing up in Scotland, and she has said the Pretenders’ music practically saved her life. Garbage’s own 1998 hit “Special” even featured a vocal interpolation of a lyric from the Pretenders’ “Talk of the Town.”

So naturally, Manson’s conversation with Yahoo Music eventually gravitates towards the controversial rape remarks that Hynde made in her new memoir and in recent interviews (when Hynde took the blame for her sexual assault at age 21 and implied that women might provoke sexual predators if they dress sexily.) Manson speaks frankly, but chooses her words carefully, when discussing her childhood idol.

“Well, first and foremost, I love her to death and I was a little taken aback by her choice of words in describing what had happened to her,” Manson begins. “I think most importantly, despite our love of our heroes, tigers are tigers for a reason — don’t be surprised if the tiger acts errantly occasionally. Nobody’s perfect. All of us have been known to say some really stupid things or some things that are open to interpretation. I think you have to remember in the situation where someone has been a victim of a violent crime, that their perspective is colored by a lot of issues. Hearing Chrissie speak, we still don’t know all the details of her experience and we don’t know the full story of how she recovered — if she’s recovered. So I disagree with her; I don’t think anyone plays a role in playing a victim of a violent crime, and I don’t think she did either. Yeah, so she was high on drugs and yeah, she was wearing a short skirt, but I still don’t think she played a role in being victimized. What I took from hearing her speak on the subject, even though I disagree entirely with how she chose to speak on the subject, I think what she’s struggling to say is just be alert, and be careful at all times. It doesn’t guarantee safety, but it can, you know… just be careful. That’s what I think she’s trying to say. But if somebody is vile enough to want to hurt another person, they will. Doesn’t matter what you’re wearing, what you’re doing, where you walk, how you walk. They will do what they want to do. That’s how I feel.

“I have never pretended to be perfect. I will continue to make sloppy mistakes. I will continue to hurt people and offend people. In this case, Chrissie has done that,” Manson continues. “She’s offended so many people and hurt so many people who were so disappointed, but she’s not perfect either. She’s to be forgiven, too, because she’s done so many other great things for women. And I wouldn’t have had an opportunity to be in this position had it not been for a fearless warrior like her. Yes, there are some people who cannot forgive what she said. I think that’s a pity.”

Some people might be surprised to learn that a rock icon like Manson, who projects what appears to be almost superhuman confidence onstage, was once an awkward child, and that she considers herself a “misfit” to this day. “I didn’t have any confidence at all. I really didn’t. I know it sounds so ridiculous,” Manson laughs. “I had courage, I had drive, I had ambition, but I didn’t have confidence. But I happened to have an incredible, amazing mom, and my mom somehow managed to get me up onstage when I was a little girl. After a while, it becomes just a habit. But make no mistake — it’s not confidence that drives people up onstage. Yes, there are a few of these ghastly entertainment freaks that we all see every now and again with this terrifying kind of confidence, and these people tend to gravitate towards a certain kind of music style. But in general, I think people who make alternative music in any way, shape, or form… well, it’s not confidence.”

Even now, at age 49 and after a quarter-century in showbiz, Manson grapples with nerves; the night of Garbage’s tour kickoff this week, she tweeted about the “fear in my belly” and posted: “Is it wrong to feel so much when you are my age? I thought I was supposed to feel dead from the neck down at this point? But I don’t.”

Manson admits in this interview, “Yes, I do feel nervous. I’ve always felt nervous, no matter how much experience I have under my belt. But I find that it’s a great mechanism on which to springboard from. It’s important to me that we serve our fans well, so I guess I care a little too much. That’s why I get nervous. But I think it’s important to care, because I’m so over people saying, ‘I don’t care.’ Well, you know what? I f—ing do care, and there’s no ‘whatever’ in my vocabulary! You know what I mean? F—ing have an idea, have an opinion, decide upon a direction, be prepared to be wrong, be willing to fail. But don’t be apathetic about anything. I feel sorry for some performers who aren’t able to do that [anymore], because they’re robbing themselves of so much joy.”

Things have never gone entirely smoothly for Garbage, whose ranks include seasoned multi-instrumentalists Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig, the latter probably most famous for producing Nirvana’s Nevermind. The day that all four band members first met up to discuss the Garbage project, on April 8, 1994, was the day that Kurt Cobain was found dead. (“I loved Nirvana, I was a huge fan, and like millions of people around the world we were pretty devastated when Kurt died… We will always be inextricably linked in the weird musical history just because of Butch and his deep connection with that band,” Manson muses.) Then, when Manson — a veteran of the indie bands Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie and Angelfish, whom Garbage’s members first spotted on MTV’s 120 Minutes — gave her real Garbage audition, she claims she totally “flunked it” and “Butch hadn’t wanted me in the first place.” Thankfully, after a second try, the lineup gelled and pop history was made.

But it still wasn’t an easy ride for the unlikely foursome. The band members have experienced their share of infighting, for instance. “We’re lucky there’s always been love and we’ve never said anything destructive to one another, which is so great, because no permanent damage has ever been done,” Manson stresses. “Yes, we get on each other’s nerves. We’re much like siblings. But I think after everything we’ve been through, everybody just feels like, ‘My God, how lucky are we?’ We’re this lucky because of one another and I think through all the really testing times that come along in any relationship… I feel like what I have with my band is precious and unique. That kind of chemistry doesn’t come along very often in your life.”

And then there was the initial backlash to Garbage’s pop-crossover sound. Many ’90s rock purists, particularly those mainly familiar with Vig’s production work for Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, considered the group’s incorporation of electronic elements downright blasphemous at the time.

“Whenever an artist releases any work, it’s yin and yang,” Manson shrugs. “There’s always those who adore you and those who decry you. That’s just the nature of being an artist. You’ll always have your detractors, and you’ll always have those who are completely ambivalent, and then you’ll always have people who’ll connect with you deeply — and we enjoyed all three of these responses and everything in between! But ironically, when we were set with the task of reissuing our debut album, we started going through a lot of our storage lockers, and I was shocked, looking back and reading a lot of the press that had been written about us in 1995. My personal memory of it was that a lot of it was negative, from people who thought it wasn’t ‘rock’ enough or wasn’t ‘authentic’ enough. But when I got to revisit all these reviews, actually the press were incredibly kind and good to us, and we enjoyed a phenomenal run of positive exposure.”

Yes, eventually critics and fans alike came to realize how groundbreaking Garbage were — and the band’s influence is still felt 20 years later. “Back [in 1995], I think things were very compartmentalized musically. Butch is a very humble man and he doesn’t really talk a lot about his game, ever, but I do think he was sitting in an incredibly privileged spot and was able to look at the soundscape of the times, and he had a way of helping us create a really new identity, a sonic identity, which was brand-new back then,” says Manson. “Obviously bands like the Beatles had done [genre hybrids] before, very successfully. But it hadn’t really been fully realized until the ’90s, really.”

Two decades later, Garbage sounds surprisingly, thrillingly fresh, both on its new deluxe reissue and live in concert, and a new, sixth Garbage album is due out in 2016. And Manson, who quips that she was “considered old back then” when she joined Garbage at age 29, shows no signs of slowing down. “I am grateful that I was a bit older and that I was ready and prepared for what came next [when Garbage made it big],” she says. “I don’t know if I’d be able to sustain this kind of career if it had come along in an earlier point of my life. It’s hard, sometimes.

“It isn’t easy, but I think clearly I’m meant to do this with my life. I’m fitted for it. I’m good at it. Like, I flourish under the kind of pressures that come with what I do. If I step onstage, I flourish. If I have to get up at 4 in the morning on tour, I can do it. I’m a freak of nature that way. It doesn’t f– with my brain; it doesn’t f— with my body. It’s some form of survival. I need to do this in order to survive.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.