Beautiful Garbage (also typeset beautifulgarbage) is the third album by alternative rock group Garbage. The album was released worldwide in October 2001 by Mushroom Records UK and in North America by Interscope and was the followup to the band's Grammy-nominated Version 2.0. Marking a departure from the sound Garbage had established on their first two records, Beautiful Garbage was written and recorded over the course of a year, during which time lead singer Shirley Manson chronicled their efforts weekly online, becoming one of the first high-profile musicians to keep an internet blog.
Released three weeks after the September 11 attacks, the album suffered from lack of promotion, mixed reaction from critics and fans alike, and the failure of its lead single "Androgyny" to achieve high chart positions. Despite faltering in major markets, Beautiful Garbage debuted at #1 on Billboard's Top Electronic Albums, topped the album charts in Australia, and was named one of Rolling Stone's "Top 10 Albums of the Year".
More diverse than their first two studio albums, musically more melodic and lyrically more direct, Beautiful Garbage featured contemporary hip hop fused with electronica, with influences coming from Eighties new wave to Sixties girl groups. Garbage acknowledged the broad span of sounds and styles, name-checking Prince to Rolling Stones, Blondie to Phil Spector and John Carpenter and Karen Carpenter.
The origins of Beautiful Garbage came from a three-day September 1999 recording session during Garbage's world tour in support of their second album Version 2.0. The sessions resulted in "Silence Is Golden" and "Til the Day I Die", which were written for a proposed B-sides album. Both songs were loose and organic, contrasting the very dense layered production that featured on Version 2.0. "Silence Is Golden" in particular had been written with an odd structure for a Garbage song: a 6/8 shuffle that progressed to a straight 4/4 beat
The sale of the band's North American record label Almo Sounds to UMG in early 2000 put the B-sides album on hold; Garbage decided to simply start work on recording their third album instead. Garbage began writing and recording the album at their own Smart Studios, in Madison, Wisconsin in April of that year. "The only vision we had was that we wanted it to sound different," recalled guitarist Duke Erikson about the influence that the two new tracks had cast, adding that the band wished to evolve the chemistry that the band had developed from touring the previous two years.
Garbage decided the best way to start writing the album was to set up their recording equipment, guitars, keyboards, drum kit and a sampler and "jam" as a group. Their improvisation led the inspiration of a few songs such as "Shut Your Mouth", where the band played for three hours while Manson spontaneously composed lyrics, while "Breaking Up the Girl" came from both Erikson and drummer Butch Vig strumming acoustic guitars in the studio lounge. The band felt that it was foremost that the new songs worked on an emotional level with Shirley's vocals and lyrics. The initial sessions ultimately led to around 32 song ideas to develop further. Smart Studios had upgraded their mixing console to a Trident A-Range model, which the band used extensively. The band tracked directly onto analogue tape using a Studer tape machine, which was then dumped into Pro Tools digital audio workstation. Overdubs and mixing were carried out in Pro Tools.
Vig kept the drums and percussion simpler than before. Percussive tracks were recorded through a thirty-year old Roger Meyer compressor to colour the sound (Vig: "It's really saturated and distorted, but in a very musical way") Some tracks however were fairly scrutinized: an instrumental break in "Til The Day I Die" incorporated reverse tape effects. Vig was not satisfied with his "swing" on a 6/8 groove written for a falsetto vocal Manson had recorded on "Can't Cry These Tears", so he recruited Matt Chamberlain to play the part. The recorded sequence incorporated Chamberlain's contribution, some of Vig's performance and some light programming. Chamberlain also performed a "chopped-up" drum pattern for "Cup of Coffee" and a "bitchin' funk groove" on "Confidence".
Much of the recorded guitar work was heavily processed, the band using a Line 6 Pod for melodic parts and embellishments: for example, for the middle 8 of "So Like a Rose", Erikson played a Les Paul with an E-bow through the Pod, while the synth-like intro to "Parade" was created by layering an acoustic part with a clean electric guitar. A tremolo effect on "Can't Cry These Tears" was inspired by sixties production techniques. The amp modelers were used to pre-effect the recording prior to Pro Tools, in order to prevent phasing. For electric guitar recording, the band utilized cabinet miking - four mikes recorded the output of a Marshall amplifier. Acoustics were recorded using a single Blue Bottle mike. Daniel Shulman, who had performed bass guitar on Version 2.0 and the band's two world tours, spent two separate weeks laying down bass parts. Shulman was given freedom by the band to come up with parts and be creative, creating new basslines on the verses of "Androgyny" and "Nobody Loves You". Shulman revisited "Silence Is Golden", breaking up the straight eighths of the coda to make it more interesting.
Due to Manson's growing confidence and technical skill, the band decided that her vocals did not require much treatment, utilizing a number of guide vocals in the final mixes: the vocal on "So Like a Rose" was recorded on the first take. On some songs, however, Manson's vocal was subject to Pro Tools plug-ins and post effects. "Til The Day Die" featured a digital "scratch"-effect, created by printing her vocal to DAT and using whatever edited passes sounded good. On "Can't Cry These Tears", the four vocal parts were triple-tracked using different mikes, while a guitar riff was matched to her voice for a section of "Breaking Up the Girl". On "Cherry Lips", her entire vocal was sped up and heavily EQ'd. On slower songs such as "Drive You Home", Garbage were not overly concerned with phrasing and pitch, giving it "a rawer quality".
Garbage finished recording Beautiful Garbage at the end of April 2001, and spent a month completing the final mix (some songs had gone through as many as 40 rough mixes). Final EQ, compressing and sequencing on the album was handled by Scott Hull of Classic Sound in New York.Despite running a competition on their website to name the album, Manson's own working title, inspired by a lyric in Hole's "Celebrity Skin" won out. The album artwork came from Garbage's wish for it to be "something organic". The band came up with the fractured rose idea, thinking that it worked well with the album title. Garbage contracted London-based designers Me Company to create the visuals.
