A brief list of things I collect: 1) Music. 2) Beer. So when Diffuser asked me to pair 21 brews of my choosing with their alt/indie/rock album equivalents, well, the work was already done. This was a labor o— hiccup! Er, sorry. What was I saying? Oh yeah: pop cap, hit play, cheers.
As Aural loyalists will remember, we recently sat down for a long talk with the eternally lovely Shirley Manson on the occasion of Garbage’s self-funded return to music. She dropped so many nuggets that we had to break the thing up into three parts. Revisit the official SPIN Interview, then dive into Shirley’s Words of Wisdom, and check out her dissection of the entire Garbage catalog here.
It was a true honor to interview Shirley Manson for SPIN. The Q&A originally appeared as the cover story of the April iPad issue, and exclusive content from our two-hour face-off wound up in the print mag too (Words of Wisdom, LOUD issue). Here’s an excerpt from the chat, which covered everything from the overdue Garbage reunion to Shirley’s status as a recovering cutter:
“It’s unbelievable what’s happened to Lana Del Rey! It’s shocking misogyny. I look at her and say, “What more do you want?” Here’s a beautiful young girl who tried her hand at being a working musician under her own name and it didn’t stick. She had the fortitude to go back to the drawing board and create something new, a perfectly executed re-entry into the world of music, and she’s getting destroyed for the very same thing that Jack White is so brilliant at. Granted, they’re very different artists, but why are we attacking a young girl who’s ballsy and creative? All I can say is they did the same thing to me when I came out. I was constantly being called a phony, and I’m thinking, ‘I was in a band that failed miserably for ten years. What’s fake about that?'”
I recently had the esteemed honor of attending the homecoming show for Dangerbird co-founder Jeff Castelaz, who’d just completed his cross-country cycling expedition in the name of his charitable non-profit, The Pablove Foundation. A pretty impressive array of artists showed up to perform mini sets, which you can read about here, via Spin. Peep the flyer.
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