Music

Shirley Manson On Garbage's Journey To 'No Gods No Masters'

XPN | By Kimberly Junod,

Published July 16, 2021 at 2:14 PM CDT

Garbage is a band that opened my eyes and shifted my perspective. When I first heard their music, I was a 10-year-old kid in a house where classic rock was everything. It was a lot of guys with guitars. My mind was blown by "Queer," from Garbage's 1995 debut album, a track I discovered from a mix CD. It was fierce, sultry and a bit angry; it was a dangerous, candidly sexual woman making a kind of rock music I hadn't heard before. It was the same record that launched the band and frontwoman Shirley Manson into global rock stars.

Despite the confidence of their music, fame didn't always come easy. And yet, Garbage is still making music 25 years later. Their latest album, No Gods No Masters, was released in June.

In this episode, we speak with Shirley Manson about the band's journey, her own growth as an artist and being a woman in an industry known for being hostile toward powerful women. Listen to the full session in the audio player above.

Music

Kimberly Junod

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).

See stories by Kimberly Junod

Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.

See stories by Raina Douris