The Stories Behind The Songs
Garbage
A song about “out-thinking and outmanoeuvring your opponent”, I Think I’m Paranoid gave the band a Top 10 hit and a push towards a Grammy.
A song about “out-thinking and outmanoeuvring your opponent” – the opponent here being sections of the music industry – it gave the band a Top Ten hit and a push towards a Grammy.
Shirley Manson knew that the follow-up to Garbage’s self-titled debut album would involve a different approach. “I am going to be directing this in terms of what we touch on lyrically,” the flame-haired Scot would soon inform drummer Butch Vig and guitarists Steve Marker and Duke Erikson when it came to making what became Version 2.0.
“It was an arrogant move on my part but it was also necessary,” she admits now. “I tried to please the band, but in the back of my mind I understood that in order for Garbage to grow and be authentic I had to be a strong frontperson. In order to be paid attention, your band needs a gladiatorial kind of approach to being out there in the public eye. I felt like I knew what I had to do, and it turned out I was right.”
Released 20 years ago, I Think I’m Paranoid was the second single from their second album, Version 2.0. It gave them a fourth UK Top 10 hit, and it became one of the band’s flagship songs.
At heart it’s a rock track with big hooks, and it leaned heavily on new technology. “Arguably it was the first fully digital album ever,” says Manson. “It was certainly one of the first using technology that not many people knew much about. We didn’t know what it could do or what the limitations were.”
Working directly with the software developers who were designing Pro Tools, Garbage worked with prototypes that were sent to the studio as they recorded.
“It created this strange sonic imprint that incorporated all this new technology,” Manson recalls.” We came from an analogue mindset, so there was this bridge of old-school and new ideas. It’s really poppy, which was the intent. Everything about it was perfectly executed. We wanted to make a sci-fi pop record. At the time, we were obsessed with Blade Runner and knew the world was changing. It was a watershed moment and we were fixated on that with ideas of futurism and electronic music.”
Added to her sultry vocal were lyrics that confronted mental health issues. A significant influence on Manson at the time was Janice Galloway’s novel The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, about the breakdown of a 27-year-old woman struggling with alcoholism and anorexia. Manson suggests the book had a wider influence than on just the track of the same name on Version 2.0.
“That was a huge book for me, and I always wanted to break certain taboos around mental health which were not being discussed,” she says. “I loved that book, which was dealing with mental health, and at that time not a lot of artists were talking about the subject.
“It’s still unusual, I guess [to write about mental health], but on that record I came from a combative standpoint – which I have done all my career. I understand the world is not warm and cuddly and out there to embrace you. I came from a Viking perspective in a way, which is that you have to fight and you have to take a hit, fail, lick your wounds and come back and fight your corner.”
I Think I’m Paranoid rounded on the nefarious aspects of the music industry. The success of Garbage’s debut and a string of hit singles, after a 10-year slog in Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, had made Manson cautious.
“The lyrics were about my feeling that everything out there is against me and I have to be careful and I have to be smart. It’s basically about outwitting your enemy, whatever that is, and looking out. You have to keep out-thinking and outmanoeuvring your opponent, because when you have a successful record, people are up your arse! There was a lot of stuff that came at us after the first record.”
Manson rejected attempts to make her the latest ‘It Girl’ or allow Garbage to be labelled a ‘zeitgeist’ band. “That stuff is toxic and it’s dangerous. There’s not a lot of arse-licking in Scottish culture, and I didn’t want to be part of that because it will destroy you. It’s about power, and it can be intoxicating, but in my upbringing there was a lot of ‘tall poppy syndrome’ – if you stuck your head above the crowd you’d get cut down – for better or worse.”
I Think I’m Paranoid was the second of five hit singles from an album that would go on to sell four million copies worldwide, cementing Garbage’s place in popular culture at a time when alternative music dominated the mainstream. Manson’s dark glamour was a boon to the band, and beyond featuring heavily in the promo videos, she was also a compelling magazine cover star who made good copy.
“The context of the time in which the record came out was when indie and alternative music ruled the roost.
If you weren’t indie, you weren’t getting on the big TV shows or on the cover of magazines. It was the first and only time independent and alternative music was the mainstream. That was just our good fortune. That climate has not repeated itself yet. I remember going on Top Of The Pops and was thrilled, thinking, ‘I’m a legitimate
“The lyrics were about my feeling that everything out there is against me and I have to be careful and I have to be smart.”
singer in a band.’ We were performing in front of these young kids who looked uncomfortable and unhappy because they wanted to get to the opposite stage where Blur or somebody else were.
“I can’t say I enjoyed the trappings and the fame that came with a lot of that stuff. I’ve watched a lot of my peers who are famous musicians, and they love the power of being the most socially powerful person in the room and get off on it. They want people to be nervous around them and serving them. That to me is utterly repulsive and vile. I’m not going to give a famous rock star any more attention than a normal person – fuck that. I believe that, down to the depths of my dark and twisted soul.”