Interview: Garbage's Shirley Manson Speaks Out About Dark Times And A New Record

Reclining on the bed in her suite at the Hotel Best Western in Chavannes-de-Bogis, Switzerland, Shirley Ann Manson is recalling the reasons why her band Garbage broke up for almost seven years. Having exploded onto the scene with their eponymous debut in 1995, and then toured the world exhaustively for a decade, the multi-million-selling alt-rock act decided to go their separate ways in 2005.
“It was a dark moment, in some regards, because we had become so frustrated with one and other in the band that we were finding it difficult to co–exist,” the 49-year-old singer recalls, still speaking in her strong native Edinburgh accent despite her many years living in L.A. “That’s one of the reasons we just decided to come off the road. There’s a lot of reasons for why that tension emerged in the first place, but we really needed a break from each other and the business. It was terribly dark because it’s frightening when you don’t get to do what you love to do, and you think that perhaps it’s gone forever.
“It was a time of great frustration and sadness, but also just ended up being an incredible period of growth and a moment for the band to get back in touch with normal life.”
Certainly their constant life on the road bore little or no resemblance to most people’s idea of normality…
“We’d been touring for a decade and that turns you into a fucking freak!” she laughs. “You know nothing about what’s going on in the world, and you know nothing about politics, and you know nothing about the cost of a postage stamp. You lose all perspective, and we had all gotten to that point where we were empty vessels, so we all got a chance to live our lives and to be with our families and friends and focus on stuff that we all love to do, thus build another life for ourselves that has allowed us, I think, to have a second act. Had we not experienced that breakdown of communication I don’t think we would have been able to make the last two records.”
Their second act happened almost seven years later. Manson reunited with her older American bandmates Duke Erikson (bass, keyboards), Steve Marker (guitar) and Butch Vig (drums, percussion) in late 2011, and the four went straight back into the Garbage business with the release of successful comeback album Not Your Kind of People the following year. They’re currently midway through touring Europe in support of their sixth studio album, Strange Little Birds.
Does she worry about history repeating itself now that they’re back in the same old saddle?
“I don’t think it will ever repeat itself because we’ve changed – we’ve taken action,” she insists. “We took action to change the circumstances in which we found ourselves so miserable. I think we have now realised the kind of people we are, the kind of people, band, and musicians we are. We just do not do well on a major label. We are far too opinionated and defiant.
“I don’t say that in any large way like we’re coming into rooms and smashing them up and being rude to people, but we have an idea of what we want to do in our lives and what we believe is an authentic, moral way forward. That’s how we want to live our lives and so, now that we have put everything in place that allows us to make music in that kind of environment, I don’t think that kind of tension exists anymore between us.”
Having spent their early years signed to a major, Strange Little Birds is their second release on their own record label, Stunvolume. Does that make life easier or does it pose its own problems?
“It absolutely poses its own problems!” she guffaws. “Of course it does, yeah. But they’re problems that we’re willing to live with instead of the other way around. When we were on a major label there were so many problems that we just couldn’t jive with, we couldn’t accept. Having our own label definitely causes some stress and some hair pulling and we’ve definitely had to manage our own expectations, because you can’t possibly compete on an independent label with the major label distribution services, it’s just an impossibility. We’re delighted to accept that for a better life.”
Garbage began writing and recording Strange Little Birds in early 2013, mostly working in Vig’s basement or at engineer Billy Bush’s Red Razor studios in L.A. (she married Bush in 2010).
“We sort of do it the same way every time,” she explains. “It’s just a random way of working. Sometimes we got together at Butch’s house, in his basement studio, and did a lot of jamming there. Other times somebody will bring in an idea to the group and then we all dissect it and augment it and build up a Frankenstein version of itself. Generally speaking we work in a variety of different ways. It all just depends on the song and where we’re at at any given time in the process.”
Mostly dealing with love, relationships and heartbreak, the songs on Strange Little Birds sound to be amongst the most personal she has ever written.
“Well, it occurred to me on our last tour supporting our studio record, Not Your Kind Of People, I was aware that there was things that I haven’t really touched on, ever, in my career in Garbage and I wanted to attend to that going into the recording sessions for Strange Little Birds. What that realisation was was that I tended not to want to touch on romance, touch on my private life, so to speak.
“I wanted to focus on moments on my life where I had been in love with somebody, and I wanted to delve into those moments and bring them on to the record. Every song on the record deals with a moment between me and somebody that I’ve been in love with, and so to me that is romantic. That’s when you’re at your most vulnerable, when you fall in love.”
While Manson has always has a reputation as a strong, feisty and outspoken sort of rock star, she reveals a very different side to her character on songs such as ‘If I Lost You’ (“There are times when I see you talking to other girls/ I feel insecure/ and every time I see you walking out/ I wonder if you’re coming back to me”).
“I think human beings are complex and we’re not just one thing at one time,” she observes. “There’s always concurrent drivers in a human being of any substance. There are moments in my life where I feel insecure and certainly that sudden realisation that when you love somebody… just how vulnerable that makes you. I guess ‘If I Lost You’ is a study of that realisation that when you fall in love, and you are committed to that person and are serious, you’re putting yourself at peril in a way. Your happiness is in their hands. That’s a weird, wonderful, horrific realisation – for me at least.”
Does he feel those emotions every time she sings the song?
“I’m kind of in touch with how I feel for the most part,” she says, after a pause. “I don’t compartmentalise my feelings a lot. Everything sort of swims around in the dark murky waters of my psyche, so I don’t find it difficult to tune into my emotions. When I’m in concert and I’m singing a song like that I can tap right into where I was when I was writing it.”
Has she ever cried on stage?
“I have, actually, I have!” she laughs. “Numerous times! Yes, I have.”
She’s reluctant to choose any one particular song as a personal favourite. “I know this sounds incredibly annoying, and I’m being a real cliché of someone in a band, but I feel that right now music is getting so dissected and parcelled out into little morsels to make things easy for people – to me that’s not how albums should ever be listened to. To me an album is a body of work that people have taken a lot of time and love over and it deserves to be heard from start to finish, as it was intended to be. I don’t really think of the record in terms of songs at the moment. I just want people to hear the record and the whole journey that we have tried to sculpt.”
Although not quite a concept album, Strange Little Birds is certainly sequenced. “Yeah, we take sequencing so seriously! We’re just that kind of old–school band. We grew up with vinyl so we tend to sequence thinking of an LP. That, to me, is the most exciting way of sequencing a record - taking people on that journey.”
Speaking of journeys, it’s been 21 years since Garbage first formed. How would she say everybody has changed in that time?
“I shouldn’t really speak for everyone because their life is theirs to comment on, but certainly from my point of view, I feel like a completely different person!” she laughs. “I would hope that would be the case. I really believe that you have to continue to grow as a person in this life. You only get one spin, why should you stay stuck? I constantly want to forge forward and hopefully become a more realised version of myself. I for one ache to learn more and I want experience and I want wisdom, all these words that we’re taught are so ugly these days are still so beautiful. I yearn to be wise, I yearn to be experienced!
“I don’t understand why culturally we’re not encouraged to do that. It’s crazy – we’re encouraged right now, especially women, to stick our fingers in our mouths and be infantilised and to pass themselves off as ten years younger than they are. I, for one, didn’t buy into that. I feel really at odds with that philosophy.”
Does Shirley Manson have a motto in life?
“You know, I didn’t think I did, but I’ve started to adopt a phrase that my mom used to say to me - and it used to really infuriate me and make me angry. She used to say to me, ‘You have to engineer your own happiness’. When I was young I didn’t really understand what that meant and deep, deep down I think I always thought that someone would come along and fix my life for me, fix whatever frustrations I had, pains I had, sort out a situation that was perhaps less than ideal.
“As I’ve gotten older, funnily enough since my mum died, I think when I lost my mother I finally grew up. I became an adult the night my mum died. Everything changed for me and I understood exactly what she meant by that. You just have to work at your life. You have to work at designing it and making it beautiful and keeping it clean. I just really have started to understand what my beloved mother meant, and I would say that that’s become my motto.”
Finally, will Garbage be visiting Irish shores in the near future?
“We are not coming to Ireland as far as I know,” she sighs. “It sort of breaks my heart, if the truth be told, but we go where we’re invited and we haven’t been invited to Ireland by any promoter for a long, long time. I had assumed that nobody in Ireland wants to hear from us, because I always think that it’s strange that we haven’t been there since 1998.”
Now that’s a load of garbage!
Strange Little Birds is out now on Stunvolume.