If you thought Shirley Manson's music sounded like garbage, you'd be right. Because that's her band's name - Garbage, out of Madison Wisconsin. Ironically, the band decide to call itself Garbage after hearing a negative appraisal of their sound from a "friend."
Shirley Manson is the only Briton (she's from Scotland) in an otherwise American band. Garbage was one of the more successful bands of the alternative-rock world Nirvana and Pearl Jam begat in the early nineties. Their self-titled 1995 debut album featured what would become one of their signature songs, "Only Happy When It Rains," and it got a hugely positive reception from rock fans and critics. Version 2.0, their 1998 follow-up, was just as enthusiastically received, with songs such as "I Think I'm Paranoid" and "Push It."
In the comparatively barren twenty-first century, the band has continued to put out albums, albeit at a slow rate. Beautiful Garbage from 2001 and Bleed Like Me, from 2005 were their only output in the two thousand zeroes, and it took seven years (thanks to a self-imposed hiatus) before they released a follow-up to Bleed Like Me - 2012's Not Your Kind of People, which featured "Battle in Me." In the four years after that, while Garbage fans waited for their sixth LP, Ms. Manson made news on her own when, after Kanye West suggested that Beck wasn't a real artist when his Morning Phase album beat out a Beyoncé album for the 2015 Album of the Year Grammy; she said West had no right to pass judgment on what "real artistry" was.
Thanks, Shirley. :-)
Garbage released their sixth album, Strange Little Birds, which Ms. Manson and her bandmates have described as "a sweeping, cinematic record of a unified mood: darkness." At this writing, Shirley Manson is 51, and there's no telling how long it will take her and her band mates to release a seventh album. But I think she's in it for the long haul. :-)
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