Song Exploder - Garbage - Felt

Episode Date: May 15, 2014

The band Garbage formed in 1994 when three guys from Madison Wisconsin — Butch Vig, Steve Marker, and Duke Erikson, met Scottish singer Shirley Manson. Twenty years later, they've sold over 17 million records worldwide. In this episode, we'll get a view inside their 2012 song "Felt" from the album "Not Your Kind of People." Butch Vig, who is also a legendary producer behind some of the most influential albums of all time like Nevermind by Nirvana, Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, Dirty by Sonic Youth, and countless others, spoke to me from his home studio in Los Angeles. I also interviewed Shirley Manson separately to get her insight on how the song was made. Plus some thoughts from their longtime engineer and now co-producer Billy Bush.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language. The band Garbage formed in 1994 when three guys from Madison, Wisconsin, Butch Vig, Steve Marker, and Duke Erickson, met Scottish singer Shirley Manson. 20 years later, they've sold over 17 million records worldwide. In this episode, we'll get a view inside their 2012 song, Felt, from the album Not Your Kind of People. Butch Vig, who is also a legendary producer behind some of the most influential albums of all time, like Never Mind by Nirvana, Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, Dirty by Sonic Youth, and countless others, spoke to me from his home studio in Los Angeles.

I also interviewed Shirley Manson separately to get her insight on how the song was made. Plus some thoughts from their longtime engineer and now co-producer, Billy Bush. This is Felt by Garbage on Song Exploder. Hi, my name is Butch Vig. I'm a music producer and I'm also the drummer in I play a lot of instruments, but primarily drums. We're not just defined to one role. We get to play a lot of different instruments, and that's one of the things that's cool about being in the band.

The track is one of the simpler songs on the record. The song started with a very simple riff, kind of a drone and E. I came up with just the initial riff, and it doesn't really have a chorus. It just sort of has this turnaround that Duke and Steve came up with. That is grungy sounding. It's almost like a blues progression in a way, because it just loops that main riff and then it has the turnaround and it goes back in the main riff.

As I remember, the initial guitar that was recorded was kind of a scratch guitar and we didn't think about it too much. So it sounds kind of lo-fi in a good way. A lot of times we'll record something really quick thinking, at least I'm thinking, oh, we'll go back and get a quote-unquote better sound later and then we fall in love with it and leave it. Relatively quickly, Shirley, came up with an idea for some vocals. I think she, more than anyone, really thought should have sort of a shoe gazer vibe to it, really saturated guitars and dreamy kind of ethereal sounding vocals. Well, he's been very generous, but I did have an idea for how I wanted the song to sound, for sure. My name is Shirley Manson, and I'm the lead singer of Garbage, the band.

I wanted it to sound basically like the cocteau twins of The Truth Be Told, who are one of my all-time favorite bands. They're a touchstone band for me. I'm lucky, you know, because my husband is an engineer, so I can like shove ideas down whenever I see fit really, you know, shove something on this, so it sounds like the Cocktail Twins. And so I put up a couple reverbs and she was like, that's it. And she's saying it. I'm Billy Bush, producer, engineer, and mixer. The scratch vocals that we did that day were the ones that ended up on the record. She wanted it to sound huge and dreamy and ethereal in her headphones when she sang it.

She just said, I'm not going to get the right vibe unless you kind of get the same. on that we're going for. And I think that helped her get the vibe instantly. A lot of the vocals on garbage records are processed, but very rarely ever with any reverb, which is not really much of a fan of reverb. Sometimes there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but I think we're pretty aware of who has a good idea at the time and letting them run with it, whether it's me or Duke or to you for Shirley. And sometimes if someone has a vision, the other three of us will just sort of take

a back seat and follow that person to try out an idea or an arrangement, whatever it is, until we sort of get to a point where it either works or no one's into it. In the case of felt, I think it's a little bit atypical for garbage because it is simple. And the song came together really quickly. Most of our songs have a difficult birth. It might start out with a vibe. And then we try a lot of different things. We experiment a lot and we record a lot of different ideas and sometimes argue about those until we get to a point where all of us can agree on the song. But more often than not, our songs are a fairly messy, complicated affair and felt came together very quickly. I had been sitting in my bedroom thinking, I wonder what happened to Lawrence from the band

Felt. So earlier on, I'd been stalking Lawrence on the internet. And so the word Felt was in my brain. And also, I'd had an experience that day for a friend of mine, who had been berating me about making decisions based solely on my feelings, which are, as you can imagine, pretty strong one way or another, always. You know, I'm just ruled by my feelings. And she was insisting that I switch my feelings off and use my logic, use my brain. I thought it was a really powerful statement. And so I guess all these ideas and thoughts were in my brain

when the instrumental came through that day. And I came up with a melody and the words tripped out at the same time. It was really super easy. I wish all songs were that simple. A lot of the drums I recorded on Not Your Kind of People I did in the den here right outside my little home studio, which is primarily where I watch football games on Sundays. It's not really a studio, as you can see. It's just four walls of drywall.

But we have a secret weapon in garbage. We have these old Roger Meyer compressors. I think they're solid state and they sound pretty weird in a cool way. They get distorted quickly. I have one and Billy has one and we have a tendency to run the drums through them quite a bit and get a little bit of that unpredictable quality in the way the drums sound. And as soon as you ran it through the Roger Meyer just completely sort of shreds a little bit and pushes the volume up on it.

You can really hear the overhead room mics cranking up and down and saturating input, which is good. By the time I compress it, add EQ, run it through the Roger Meyer. It no longer sounds like I recorded the drums in my den. like it's going into some otherworldly space. We made a conscious effort to start Not Your Kind of People in more of a low-key manner. When we first started writing songs, no one knew we were even getting together. We didn't want to go into a full rock studio and block it out for three or four or five months at a time. We want to just get some ideas quickly and there's no overhead for us to hang there.

We can open a bottle of wine and just sort of plug in instruments and jam and see what comes out of it. It's funny, the very first garbage record we did, a lot of the song ideas came from Steve's basement. And we had a little eight-track ADAT that we were jamming on, and a Mac computer so we could do some loops and things. And we probably spent three or four months there coming up with song ideas before we actually went into Smart Studios. And Steve and I own Smart and Duke worked there a lot as an engineer and producer. And we could have just gone in there, but we decided let's go super low-key, no pressure. and it worked. So I think when we started Not Your Kind of People,

we wanted to go back to that kind of low-key guerrilla style, if you will, and not worry so much about, okay, we're going into the recording studio today. Let's hopefully get our shit together. It's funny, I don't really think of myself these days as having to need a real recording studio to get a good sound. There was a time, I guess, when I started making a lot of rock records with Nirvana or the Pumpkins, and I felt like you've got to be in the best studio you can get in.

I want to have a Neve or an API console or whatever it is. But I don't really feel that way now. I think you can get amazing sounds with whatever you're given, whatever your limitations are, whether it's a world-class studio or whether it's recording in your garage or your basement. We had Justin Meldell Johnson come in and play bass on this track, who's an incredible bass player. We love work with him because he's got a great vibe.

He's funny. He always has really good ideas and he's quick. You know, Doak and Steve play bass, but not as good as Justin. We might write the part between us in the band, but it's always better to get someone and who really knows their instrument. Justin played a cool little turnaround at the end of each verse where he just swings the notes a little bit. Because the song is so simple and repetitive, little changes like that in the bass sort of

help really define the arrangement. When I first started in garbage, I was very fearful and I didn't have a lot of confidence and I felt really intimidated by their reputation. and so I would do my best to be prepared for when I stepped into the studio. On one hand, that's great to be prepared, but also I think it can be a very restrictive way of working and being creative because I would have one idea and it would matter to me whether I sold that idea. And if I didn't sell that idea to them, I'd be really gutted and feel like a failure.

And now as a writer, I understand it's like playing. You know, there must be a million ways to play this scene. so here's one way here's another and I genuinely think I'm not as married to an idea as I used to be and as a result it's you start having more ideas the less married you are to ideas the more you have and that gives you confidence because you know that

no matter what a microphone can go up in front of you somebody can play a piece of music and you can come up with something well I never believed that before when I first started with garbage I didn't believe in that but now I'm older I feel like the studio should be playful and it should be fun. To me, if you're going to write a shoegaser song, you've got to have a lot of fuzzy, saturated guitars.

It's got to kind of be a wall of sound. That was the primary goal on this once Cheryl came up with her idea for their vocals, as Duke and Steve knew they needed to record kind of a Phil Spectre approach almost. There's a lot of guitar tracks that we layered on here. And after each verse and chorus that Cheryl sang, does this little turnaround riff. The guitars are a bit out of tune here and there. I think the guitars being slightly out of tune on this song are okay

because if everything is perfectly in pitch, it sounds kind of clean, and part of that sort of saturated sound and that wall of sound is that everything is slightly out of tune, just ever so slightly, and that gives it a much wider kind of washy sound. This is one of my favorite things. Cheryl just did this crazy ad libidableness.

at the end of the song and we loved it and left it in. You can hear the vocal mic as a story in a little bit. She was really leaning into it. I think you can hear it's a handheld mic too. So that might have been the first pass she did where she just used a handheld mic as she ran through the song. I mean, it sounds like garbage because I hear Shirley's voice on it. And we're a band that's lucky in that way.

We can kind of do anything sonically. And once you put her voice on it, it sounds like garbage. Oh, the lo, the lo, lo, the loos. Yeah. I wanted to come up with something different. And I was like, what would Susie do? do because I was so obsessed with Susie at that particular. I mean, I've always been obsessed by Susie. She's been, again, a massive touchstone for me. She was the first rock star I fell in love with,

like genuinely. And I'd been listening to a lot of her records at the time of making the last record a couple of years ago now. And I said, what would Susie do in this part? Because I wanted something aggressive because the whole song had been so dreamy. And I thought it would be unexpected to have something a little more weird. And I came up with the lo-l-l-l-l-l-l-los, and then my husband put this weird effect on it, and it just sounded cool as fuck in my mind. I was like, I sound like Susie! Let's keep it in! Well, my absolute favourite Susie in the Banshee song is quite obscure.

It's called Drop Dead Celebration. I used to play it non-stop when I was a kid. Thanks for busting me. If I get sued by Susie, I will come to you. I remember we were mixing the record and I was listening to Ruffs in my car. This is one of my favorite tracks and I would just crank it at stunned by him driving down the 101 or whatever because I just love the vibe on it, you know. As I said, I don't even know exactly what Shirley's singing in all the lyrics,

but it doesn't matter because I love the song. I think when you're in a band, the alchemy that exists between members of the band is invaluable and misunderstood by the public and underestimated in general, know, because tiny things that get included become huge. People don't really understand bands. They don't know how they work. They don't know how they're balanced. The balance is so...

And again, I know that you know this. It's magic. And now here's Felt by Garbage in its entirety. SongExploder.net for more information on garbage, including a link to purchase the song Felt, as well as links to the other songs referenced in this episode. A note about that song we heard by the band Felt. It's called primitive painters and features guest vocals by Elizabeth Fraser, lead singer of the Cockto Twins.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full-Aing, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishykech Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast,

like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage,

and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishikash.co, or just go to SongExploder.net, slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find SongExploder on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. And you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at songexplor.net or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.