Garbage’s Shirley Manson: ‘I Would Never Give Up on America’

In the last two years, Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson went to hell and back twice. First, she had hip-replacement surgery to repair damage she suffered from a 2016 onstage fall. Then last year, her other hip broke, and she went through surgery and recovery again.

Today, she’s healed up and her band has a great new album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, out this week and a summer tour on the horizon. “I am alive and kicking — if not as high,” Manson says, sounding especially cheery, on a Zoom from Scotland in late April.

“I have recovered, and I feel really grateful,” says the singer, 58, in her ornate Edinburgh burr. “People are going through unbelievable shit, so I don’t really feel that I’m in any position to whine on. Suffice to say it was a challenge. It was not glamorous and at times depressing. But here I am, out of the woods.”

She may be in the clear, but she’ll be living with the aftermath of her surgeries for some time to come, since she wrote the album’s lyrics while in recovery. On “Sisyphus,” a serene, breathy meditation that sounds literally ethereal (as in, ether-inspired), she sings, “This little body of mine is going to make things right,” and, on “Love to Give,” a similarly pensive pop-rock number, she opines, “Isn’t life wonderful when your body works.” The album’s most telling track, though, is its closer, “The Day That I Met God,” a slow-building narrative about her life uncoiling that sometimes sounds scary, sometimes beautiful as she grows to understand herself (with a little help from a certain painkiller).

Manson’s poetic suffering, and her bandmates’ alt-rock songwriting ingenuity, led to a catchy, memorable album that sits with their best work from the Nineties. Plus, it gives them a good excuse to get back on the road. “To be able to headline our own shows for the first time in nearly 10 years feels very special,” Manson says. “Because we are so much older, every time we get to go out and play together on a long tour, it feels like an enormous privilege, because you just never know when it’s going to come ’round again.”

Injuries can be depressing. What kept you going through the worst of it?
Have you met my father? I was brought up by an absolute beast. He’s 87 years old and still in the game. He basically says, “You have to grit your teeth and get on with it.” And so I did.

Were lyrics like “This little body of mine is going to make things right” on “Sisyphus” your mantras to heal up?
Everything was written during recovery, in between these two surgeries. That spilled into my writing. To find myself more or less bedbound was intense and a very new, unfamiliar experience for me.

I encouraged the band to write without me because I didn’t want them to wait. I knew that if we waited, we’d never get a record done. So they would then email me these musical ideas, and I would write to what they sent me. It was such a strange way for us to work. It turned out to be a real blessing in disguise. Each time they sent me a musical piece, I was discovering it for the first time as a listener would.

You were on some heavy meds at the time. Did that affect the way the music sounded to you?
No, but I was surprised by what they sent me. It was much more cinematic than I expected. I was like, “Oh, these sound like little movie soundtracks.” A lot of the guitars got added much later.

On the subject of music, in another interview, you said that radio became more conservative and less open to bands like Garbage after 9/11. How is that?
Well, it’s just a fact. They started dropping women off the radio, and we were told, “Yeah, they’re not going to play you anymore because they’re already playing one female voice on the radio, so there’s no space for you on modern radio.” And then any sort of alternative female perspective was dropped entirely.

Since September 11th, we’ve basically had 20 years of pop music. It’s not even my opinion; it’s just fact. And we have yet really to divorce ourselves from that. Pop music is played readily, but anything that is even remotely challenging — at least in alternative rock — doesn’t really [get played]. It’s changing now. I’ve noticed in the last two or three years, we’re seeing a shift in the culture, which is wonderful.

Getting back to your new record, how did the music the band sent you fit with how you were feeling?
Anyone who’s been bedbound will tell you it’s maddening. After a while, you feel like you’re chewing on the carpet. It’s very difficult to wrangle your brain and keep the negativity from destroying you. So I was grateful for something that required a slightly different discipline for me. It brought stuff out me that perhaps wouldn’t have come out otherwise — in particular, “The Day That I Met God.”

That song is incredibly moving because of how you sing that you found God in “everyone I ever loved.”
I was on my treadmill listening to the instrumental. When I got off, I said to my husband [record producer Billy Bush] that I wanted to record something, and I just sat down on the edge of my bed. I was in my pajamas. I was a mess. I was just an invalid. And I sang [the lyrics] into a handheld mic. It all came out in one hour. What you hear is the writing demo for me. There’s no revision on it, aside from some backing vocals that I threw on at the end. You can really hear the fragility of it.

What state were you in when you sang it?
I was in a terrible place. I was feeling really vulnerable, depressed, and scared. I was needing some kind of connection with the outer world and instead stumbled upon the chorus. I realized it was onto something really grand.

As someone who’s not party to any organized religion or practice, I was all of a sudden aware that I had found, for me, my faith. And in that terrible moment, it felt like an enormous moment for me of like, “Oh, this is what makes sense to me, and this is what God is for me.” But then of course, there’s the kiss-off at the end where you realize you’re stoned out of your gourd.

Yes, you sing that you found God in Tramadol.
I love the humor in it. It gets disarmed by this realization that perhaps I’m not as smart as I thought I was and maybe I’m just high. So it’s sort of having that inner dialogue, that wrestle with yourself and your faith.

Well, I’m glad Tramadol provided that for you.
So am I. I’m very grateful.

When did the title Let All That We Imagine Be the Light come to you?
I have no idea. I’m sure it was inspired by the movie [All That We Imagine as Light]. I have not even seen the movie, but that title lodged itself in my brain. When we were working on [“Radical”], I’d already sung, “All you’ve got to do is save a life,” and then I started singing “Let all that we imagine be the light” in the second half of the chorus. It fitted in with the music perfectly. It just seemed like such a perfect encapsulation of where my mind was at the time.

When Garbage released the album’s first single, “There’s No Future in Optimism,” you released a statement referencing George Floyd’s killing. How did his death change you?
When I listened to the track the band sent me, I immediately thought of the murder of George Floyd and how much that changed me and the way I understand the world. The Black Lives Matter protests in Hollywood were not far from my house. So the lyrics of this song are retelling the experience of being in Hollywood, being in America at that time.

Covid was happening and I couldn’t get back home. I was stuck in America, and I was unable to visit my family for the first time in my life. So I felt trapped. And I watched the murder of George Floyd, as so many of us did, on my phone. I’d never seen anything like this before in my life. I’d never seen someone be murdered on my phone. I’d never seen anyone murdered, full stop. It shook me so profoundly and changed me so profoundly.

I started to read more about Black Lives Matter movement, about racism, about colonialism, about white supremacy … The list is endless, right? I just started to try and read as much as I could to understand the context of what was happening outside my house. There were these massive protests. There were, like, 15 helicopters surrounding our house 24 hours a day. It was like a police zone. And I found it really disturbing.

I woke up one night and the house was shaking. It was an earthquake. I sat bolt upright, and my husband and I just held hands. We were silent, and then I screamed at the top of my voice, “I need to get the fuck out of here.” I felt like I was going mad. And so the song is the retelling of that story and realizing that somehow we had to elevate ourselves out of what felt like a nightmare to me.

The way you sing the song, though, feels a little like optimism.
You’re going to go mad if you don’t find a way of thinking your way out of this mess, thinking your way out of your immediate circumstance. So it’s a Bonnie and Clyde love story in a funny but anti-violent way. I think if you don’t find a way of igniting your own hope, you’re just going to fall into a pit of hopelessness and despair and you’re no use to anybody.

After everything else that’s happened in the last five years here, how close have you come to simply giving up on America?
Never. I would never give up on America. I would never give up on anyone. It’s not my style.

It annoys me, actually, when I hear Americans saying things like, “We are going to run away and settle elsewhere.” In my mind, I’m going, “Stand and fucking fight for this glorious country, stupid cunts.” You don’t get fuck all without fucking fighting for it, and everybody’s just going to fold up their wings and fuck off. Is that how you’re going to deal with a little bump in the road? I’m amazed by it.

I’m amazed by this willingness to just immediately turn your back because things are not going quite as you had hoped they would go. If you want liberty, freedom, and this glorious geographical location, that requires some effort from you as a citizen.

There are problems in absolutely every fucking country you will ever find yourself in. That is a given. And if there is some blessed country somewhere in the world currently that isn’t dealing with some really serious problem, you can be pretty sure it’s coming down the pike.