About Garbage
Garbage is a Scottish–American rock band formed in 1993 in Madison, Wisconsin. The band's line-up—consisting of Scottish singer Shirley Manson and American musicians Duke Erikson , Steve Marker , and Butch Vig —has remained unchanged since its inception. All four members are involved in the songwriting and production process. Garbage has sold over 17 million albums worldwide.
The band's eponymous debut album was critically acclaimed upon its release, selling over four million copies and achieving double platinum certification in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It was accompanied by a string of increasingly successful singles from 1995 to 1996, including "Stupid Girl" and "Only Happy When It Rains". Follow-up Version 2.0, released in 1998 after a year in production, was equally successful, topping the UK Albums Chart and receiving two Grammy Award nominations. Garbage followed this by performing and co-producing the theme song to the 19th James Bond film The World Is Not Enough .
Garbage's third album Beautiful Garbage was also critically acclaimed, but failed to match the commercial success of its predecessors. Garbage quietly disbanded amidst the troubled production of their fourth album Bleed Like Me, but regrouped to complete the album, which was released in 2005 and peaked at a career-high number four in the U.S. The band cut short their Bleed Like Me concert tour and announced an indefinite hiatus, emphasizing that they had not broken up but rather wished to pursue separate interests. The hiatus was briefly interrupted in 2007, when the band recorded new tracks for their greatest hits album Absolute Garbage. The band reunited in 2011, and self-released their 2012 album Not Your Kind of People on their own label Stunvolume to positive reviews. Their next album, Strange Little Birds, followed in 2016. Their seventh studio album, No Gods No Masters, was released in 2021.
Duke Erikson and Butch Vig had been in several bands, including Spooner and Fire Town . In 1983, Vig and Marker founded Smart Studios in Madison and Vig's production work brought him to the attention of Sub Pop. Spooner reunited in 1990 and released another record, but disbanded in 1993 as Vig and Marker's career as producers gained strength. In 1994, as Vig become "kind of burned out on doing really long records," he got together with Erikson and Marker, and they started doing remixes for acts such as U2, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and House of Pain. The remixes featured different instrumentation, and often highlighting new guitar hooks and bass grooves. This experience inspired the three men to form a band, where they "wanted to take that remix sensibility and somehow translate it into all of the possibilities of a band setup."
According to Vig, the team drew inspiration for its name from a hostile early comment, when a friend of the band heard recording material, probably for "Vow" and groaned, "This shit sounds like garbage!" However, according to This Is The Noise That Keeps Me Awake, an autobiography of the band, Vig wrote in his 1993 studio journal about the creative process; of working for long periods of time, "without coming up with anything cool... and when you least expect it, it all falls into place." The name derives from the last line of this entry: "I hope that all this garbage will become something beautiful!".
Initial sessions with Vig on vocals, along with the members' past work with all-male groups, led to the band's desire for a woman on lead. Vig declared that they wanted to find a female vocalist like "Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sioux—all really strong, unique personalities". Marker and Vig desired someone "who didn't have a high, chirpy, girly quality to her voice" and who could sing in an understated way, in contrast to "these alterna-rock singers have a tendency to scream". Marker was watching 120 Minutes when he saw the music video for Angelfish's "Suffocate Me". He showed the video to Erikson and Vig while their manager Shannon O'Shea tracked down the band's singer, Shirley Manson. When Manson was contacted, she did not know who Vig was and was urged to check the credits on Nevermind, the Nirvana album which Vig had produced.
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