Chemistry of Garbage

Shirley Manson’s back together with her Garbage bandmates Butch Vig, Duke Erikson, and Steve Marker. They hit Humphreys Concerts by the Bay on October 6. She took some trans-Atlantic phone questions from the Reader.

What are your most vivid memories of San Diego?

“We’ve always had a blessed time whenever we come down to San Diego, truth be told. I’ve never had a horrific experience in San Diego — which, just the fact that those words have come out of my mouth is now filling me with panic, that the next time I go, I’ll get my just desserts!

“I associate [San Diego] with some of the earliest shows of our career.”

How has your relationship with the other three changed?

“Ooh, that’s a good question. Our relationships have changed a great deal. When we met we were young and footloose and fancy free, and we had never experienced any kind of success, really, aside from Butch [Vig] who was fresh off his success as a producer. But I don’t think he’d absorbed that fact. I think he still thought of himself as just this nice kid from the Midwest.

“So, we were very green, and naïve, and enthusiastic, and over a 20-year career...you sober up. Crazy shit happens to you. All of us have lost all kinds of people along the way, our marriages have suffered, divorces, and then remarriages, and children being born, and life being lived. That obviously changes the relationship.

“But we still enjoy a certain kind of chemistry when we’re all together in one room. I don’t know why, but we enjoy each other’s company. When you’ve lived your lives in parallel for so long, you develop a kind of shorthand that only you and those who’ve lived this life with you understand. There’s something very precious about that collective understanding.

“But they also drive me crazy and I drive them mental!” [Laughs.]

What’s the status on a new album?

“We have a new record in the can, due to be mixed January of next year and slated for release in spring of next year.”

Do you have a title?

“We do not. That’s currently being argued about. We have four titles and we’re all arguing over them. I know which one I like...”