Garbage chat to AZ Central
Butch Vig produced Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” the Smashing Pumpkins’ multi-platinum mainstream breakthrough, “Siamese Dream” and Sonic Youth’s seminal “Dirty.” So people were paying attention when Vig repositioned himself as the drummer for Garbage, a pop group led by singer Shirley Manson, with fellow producers Steve Marker and Duke Erikson rounding out the lineup. Released in 1995, their self-titled debut went double platinum and spawned the classic modern rock hits “Only Happy When It Rains” and “Stupid Girl.”
They took a brief hiatus after releasing a fourth album, “Bleed Like Me,” in 2005, but they’ve since reunited with a great new album titled “Not Your Kind of People” set to be released on Tuesday, May 15.
We caught up with Marker to talk about the album, which somehow manages to sound like vintage Garbage and completely of the moment.
The album sounds great. I think the title track is probably my favorite.
I’m anxious for people to hear that song because I think it’s one of the better things we’ve ever done. We’re anxious to get it out there but, of course, you can’t just give away copies anymore because it gets on the Internet and you’re screwed.
One is easily screwed in today’s music industry.
(Laughs) That’s true. But we’re having a lot of fun kind of doing things on our own now, putting the record out ourselves. We’ve sort of gotten some of the fun back that we had when we first started. It had gone away over the years.
Why do you think the fun had gone away?
We started out on a really small indie label, Almo Sounds, and we were kind of the priority band on the label. But they went under after a few years and our contract got sold to a bigger company. So instead of being on this cool indie label where we knew everybody, we found ourselves on Universal and Warner Bros. It all became very impersonal and we’re not giant cash generators. We’re not Katy Perry or something like that. And we never wanted to be, really. But if you’re not generating that kind of cash for a company like that, you’re basically invisible. So that took a lot of the fun out of it. We were working really hard. And we still put out records that we’re proud of but it didn’t seem to matter. And as a band, you get disheartened.
So your problems at the label were that they weren’t really paying much attention to you, not that they were being intrusive in the creative process?
Well, you know, they want something that’s going to generate cash. So we would go ahead and do what we’d always done, which was to make records that we liked. And they weren’t being intrusive, really, but they weren’t being enthusiastic, either. It was, you know, “Check out these new songs we’re working on; we think they’re awesome.” And they would be like, “We don’t hear a hit.” I don’t want to sound like I’m just whining. But it wasn’t so much fun anymore so we took a break.
It’s been seven years since “Bleed Like Me” and the music scene has obviously been through its fair share of changes since then. Was there an attempt on your part to sort of bring Garbage into that future? And I ask because it does sound like it came out now. It doesn’t sound like “Oh, here’s this band from the ’90s.”
Yeah, we’re not stuck in the ’90s or the ’80s or whatever. Obviously, we’re listening to what’s going on. But I think it would have been really dishonest if we had tried to sound, I don’t know, like Skrillex, or get the latest rapper to come in and do a rap in the middle of the first single. That just isn’t us. But I like that you say that it sounds kind of up to date. That’s cool.
I read an interview where Butch said, “After we did our last record, we knew we needed to reinvent ourselves.” Do you feel like you reinvented yourselves?
I actually don’t. He said that we did?
He said you felt you needed to.
I think we felt more like that when we made “Bleed Like Me.” We’d been on the road a lot and felt like it was really time to come up with something new. With this record, for me, it’s more like we realized that we’re not the trendiest or hippest thing and we never really have been, but we do have a sound that happens when the four of us get together and work on music and we should embrace that. People are saying it reminds them more of our first record and I think that’s because we decided not to try and reinvent the wheel but to go with our strengths.
Did things fall right back into place when you got back together?
I think it was difficult for all of us to get to the place in our heads where we were ready to go back in a room with just the four of us and try again. But when we did, it felt natural. For me, it’s been a major, major part of my life and one of the best parts. So it was really exciting to find out that it hadn’t gone away.
Source: azcentral