Tomorrow (March 27), Pete Yorn will celebrate the 20th anniversary of his debut LP, musicforthemorningafter, which (for obvious reasons) holds a special place in the singer-songwriter’s heart. Joining forces with producer R. Walt Vincent and later, Brad Wood, Yorn went into a San Fernando Valley garage and knocked out one of 2001’s best.

After the seeds were planted with his 1996 move to Los Angeles (his two brothers work in Hollywood), the New Jersey-born, Syracuse-schooled Yorn was quickly recognized as one of his generation’s best songwriters. The album catapulted him to early success, allowing him to carve out a career without compromise and remain true to his personal ethos, especially with the music business in great flux.

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During the pandemic, Yorn has taken a long look back at his career. He recently released a covers project, performed his old albums in full on livestreams and on May 5 will release the Rooftop EP, which includes rarities and live tracks from the musicforthemorningafter era.

To celebrate the anniversary, we spoke with Yorn at length about the making of that pivotal record. And although it’s not quite 20 questions, we got a great sense of his mindset two decades ago.

SPIN: When did you start working on musicforthemorningafter?
Pete Yorn: I was done with it before it was released, I think in 2000. It sat for a year before it came out. And the beginnings of it started probably in ’99.

A lot has certainly has happened in the 20 years, at least for you, since the album was released.
It’s 20 years of energy wound up. I’m 46 now, and in 20 years I’ll be 66. But right now, being cliche, I’m trying to stay in the moment and enjoying it.

What are some of your memories of making the album?
I was so proud of it. I remember when I was making it, I felt like I didn’t compromise anything. When I got signed to Columbia, I got these opportunities to work with these super well-known producers — people who were hot at the time. I just had something really special going on with my friend Walt, who hadn’t really done much before then. We were just working in his garage at the time on a computer, which wasn’t that popular yet. We just really loved what we were doing and getting excited about it — and we were having fun. It felt effortless.

How so?
It felt like that covers record did — this fun, effortless combination of two friends making music. That’s the way I like to work. I remember resisting, once we got signed, the urge to go work with other people. I really just liked what we’re doing and I was going to just take that chance and make it how we’re making it. Then we did bring in Brad Wood. To his credit, I remember he heard the early mixes with a lot of the stuff that we had that would end up on the record. Brad just got it. I remember he said, “Well, I really love what you guys are doing in the garage. I don’t want to mess it up. I just want to come in and help you guys keep going.”

What were some of the pitches from other producers?
They were like “Oh, we need to do this and that.” I remember just like Brad being the guy who gets it. That was really cool and I remember it clearly. We just continued working and kept going.

What was your thought process and internal direction at the time of the recording?
I remember thinking in my head that I just want to make something that I’m still proud of in 10 years. And now we’re at 20, I don’t listen to that record and cringe. I never get tired of singing those songs.

At the time the record was released, singer-songwriter stuff wasn’t really that prevalent on a major label level. It was dominated by boy bands and hip hop becoming what it is today — not to mention the Strokes and the White Stripes were starting to emerge. How do you think that allowed musicforthemorningafter to stand out and how do you think that timing helped?
I remember I bumped into Little Steven [Van Zandt] at a restaurant. I didn’t know him, but I was just a fan. I think I just got signed to Columbia, and he was like “You should do a band name, do a band name.” I thought about [using a moniker], but I naturally ended up just using my own name. I always felt like musicforthemorningafter could have been a band record. It could have had that feel even though I played all of the instruments.

But it does have that feel…
I love Britpop so much, like the Smiths, Oasis, the Cure, Stone Roses, Ride, Blur all that stuff. I was also, at the time, a huge fan of roots-rock Americana, the Band, Neil Young, Beach Boys, Bruce [Springsteen] of course. [The album] sounded like it felt like more of an alternative rock record in some aspects — even though there were quiet moments — than like even the typical singer-songwriter record, or at least the idea of that.

What about for touring? What did you do to bring that element to life in a live setting?
I wanted a tight rock band. Most of the band were just old friends. I remember I really wanted a drummer as someone who was able to lock in on a click, but could also swing really hard so you didn’t feel like it was too rigid. I was obsessed with Keith Moon, but I also love electronic, so I wanted to have the balance of both. I think we auditioned 60 drummers for the live show. We found one we loved, then like two days before the tour was supposed to start, he had to leave the band because he got signed up on his own project he was on. Luckily, we found this kid Luke Adams, who ended up being our touring drummer for a couple of years.

Was there anyone or any vibe you were channeling when you were prepping for tour?
I always thought it was a little bit more rocking than the typical singer-songwriter cliche. There were other artists like that who did great stuff and were doing some pretty interesting rock and roll stuff that hit harder than a typical folk album. Morrissey had that [sings] “I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar that meant that you were protesting.” That pops out in my head. Just because you’re playing three acoustic songs doesn’t mean you can’t have this other side that wants to explode as well.

What were you listening to at the time when you were recording?
Guided by Voices! I was turned on to GBV in 1996, when I graduated college. When I moved to L.A., I found myself listening to a lot of GBV. In fact, on all my early demos, I would do a four-track recording by myself. I was just into that lo-fi sound. I was also really into Son Volt and Wilco, though I never got into Uncle Tupelo. Also, Teenage Fanclub. I was huge into them. I wanted my record to have a twist. I didn’t want to do a straight alt-country record because I felt like it wouldn’t get as much mainstream acceptance if it was that. I also remember being into Electronic with Johnny Marr and Bernard from New Order.

So that was imprinted, at least subtly, into the album?
Yeah. I remember loving that single “Getting Away With It.” When you hear “Black” and you hear a song like “Just Another Girl,” you can hear it. I remember thinking when I finished the record that I thought it was all over the place, but that’s who I am, and I didn’t know if people were going to get it or not. But I liked it, and that’s all I could do. It was almost a joke. It’s like a melting pot — like if I’m throwing in all my influences in a way that I feel is still tasteful, it’ll somehow become its own thing.

How difficult — or easy — was it to play everything yourself and create a bigger sound?
I couldn’t have made that record without Walt and Brad Wood. Those guys were able to help me bring into reality the things that I heard in my head that I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own. Of course, I was able to play a lot of instruments, but they played some great instruments to parts that accentuated my parts and made what I played even better. They would bring a lot of emotion. Walt was a master of beautiful strings. I love that sound.

How so?
He would bring that extra emotion out that I was feeling inside. I remember always just being like, “Wow, such a beautiful extra arrangement on top of this acoustic and bass and drums” or whatever that I had laid down. Those guys were such great partners. Over the years of working with great producers, I feel like that’s always what they add. They add to what I do in a way where they kind of bring a basic thing to my elements that are playing, and they add this color to it. When we have a successful recording, that’s usually what was brought to the table by some of the great producers that I’ve worked with.

What was it about Walt and Brad that made this what it was?
When I met Walt, he was like “Well, let’s try something.” I’m like, “Well, I’ll just lay the basic tracks and bring it to you. Let’s see what you can add to it.” I went to Walt with a CD file of “Just Another Girl” and it was just bass, drums, vocals, and acoustic guitar. I go to Walt’s, and he pulled it up and added this beautiful synthesized sort of stuff behind it that sounded real but fake at the same time. Then he added the harmonica at the end of the crescendo at the last chorus and put a mix on it. I remember leaving his house that first day — it was just a little garage studio he had. I put the CD-R of it in my car, and I’m driving home from Van Nuys. I don’t know if I pulled over or what, but I was just like, “Hoolllllyyyy shit. This is something special.” Talking about right now, I just got a chill about it. That’s what started it off with me and Walt. Then every other week, I’d go over to Walt’s and we’d do another song, another song, another song. And then from those first recordings, Columbia jumped on board. Then later on, we brought Brad in to help us clean up and tie the room together.

What was it like working digitally when people were still using tape?
There was a snobbery about it, I feel like. It wasn’t even Pro Tools. It was this digital performer called Motu Mark of the Unicorn. Walt had it, and I remember saying “What is this crap?” I recorded the bass, drums and acoustic guitar on Pro Tools in my basement at home with my friend JJ. I was like “What is this like Pro Tools or digital performer?” It seemed so nerdy to me to record on the computer when tape was like everything. But I quickly learned that it’s not the car, it’s the driver. There’s tons of records from the ’80s that are all tape and they sound like shit. Ultimately, though, Brad Wood was very adamant that we bounce it all to two-inch tape and he’d mix off of that.

How did that work?
We recorded everything in the garage, but we mixed at the Record Plant. When Brad mixed it, it was hard to beat the rough mixes, because the rough garage mixes really had a good feel. If I lost the feeling — not so much the sound, but the feeling I would get when I hear it — and I started to go numb, then we have a problem. The first few passes, I remember, we weren’t feeling it. Then something clicked with Brad and he just started nailing it. He nailed all the mixes, and I think the only song that was the rough mix on the record was “Lose You.” There was just something about one of the early rough mixes of it that just had this magic.

How did soundtracks and licensing your songs help keep the album going as long as it did?
That’s a great question. You know, at the time, it was crazy. We had the opportunity to have it in so many shows or movies. I don’t know if the early 2000s were the heyday of licensing or whatever, but certain placements were a great entryway to discover my music for sure. I feel like without the work that I did on top of it, it might not have amounted to much, but I think there were good opportunities. I think there is no supplement for my non-stop touring that I did. I toured for 18 straight months on that record. We just kept going and going and going which burned me out by the end of it. I think just bringing it to people and getting out in front of people ultimately was the biggest thing, but the soundtracks — especially when it was a powerful moment — it was always a beautiful thing.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

August 3, 1995: a day that will live in rap infamy. The Source was hosting its annual award show that night at the Paramount Theater in New York City and all hell was breaking loose. While Suge Knight, the infamous Death Row Records head, garnered the biggest headlines by taking shots at rival hip-hop mogul Puff Daddy and the East Coast rap establishment — on their home turf, no less — another event from that evening that helped shift the geographic focal point for the genre for decades to come. Midway through the show, the Atlanta-based rap duo OutKast were unenthusiastically given the Best New Artist award following the release of their debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. What should have been a triumphant moment was ruined when the New York audience showered both André 3000 and Big Boi with a wave of boos. Undeterred, Dre stepped to the microphone and let the angry crowd know: “The South got something to say.”

History has proven Three Stacks absolutely correct. In the years that followed, the South (and the ATL specifically) would end up saying a whole lot about the direction of modern hip-hop: Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane, Ludacris, T.I., 2 Chainz, Future, and Young Thug are just some of the big names that spawned from the fertile confines of the 404. But Atlanta’s assault on the charts began in earnest with OutKast, and more specifically, the duo’s 1996 sophomore album, ATLiens.

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In the lead up to the album, both members were undergoing serious growth in their personal lives — Big Boi became a father, while André returned to school to get his high school diploma — and maturing as artists. Together, they decided to take more control of their music, handling the production on a full third of ATLiens, including standout cuts like “Elevators (Me & You)” and the title track. The resulting record is as much a classic as the masterpieces that followed, a record lacking much of the frivolity that proved a hallmark of their debut album (and even much of their later work). In its place is a subtle anger and an unmistakable sense of determination: The duo had a point to prove and were intent on making it with precision. “It’s all about growth,” Big Boi says of the album 20 years later. “Maturity. Discipline. Faith.”

To honor the 20th anniversary of ATLiens (the album’s birthday is later this week, on August 27), SPIN rang up the rapper born Antwan Patton to get a better idea of what went into the creation of ATLiens, and how the LP helped shape the future success of the greatest duo in rap history.

How much did the success of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik change you and André?
We were teenagers. So Southernplayalistic, it gave us a chance to see the world. We traveled a lot and performed all over the world. You know, you got two teenagers from Georgia who hadn’t been past South Carolina or Florida seeing Europe, and the West Coast, and New York. It kind of broadened our horizons. The world is bigger than where you live.

You guys went on a trip to Jamaica around that time that is said to have had a pretty big impact on the group.
I didn’t make that trip. Everybody else in the Dungeon [Family] went. Unfortunately, my Aunt Renee — who was my guardian at that time — passed away, so I missed that trip. I spoke about that on the song “Babylon” on ATLiens. They all went to Jamaica and everybody came back with dreads and it was like, “S**t.” But, I was grieving at the time, so I morphed into something else.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TW3h3tk3iME

Another big change around then: You became a new father between the release of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and ATLiens. How much did that affect your outlook on the world?
It made me more responsible. My daughter became my number-one priority. It was like the papa bear and his cubs. You would do anything to protect that baby and anything to provide for your family.

I had to learn how to balance recording and being a father. I’m glad I did, because it’s [my daughter’s] senior year at Auburn University and me and her mom and her uncles went down there — we don’t use movers, so we moved her into a brand-new townhouse for her senior year of school. She was just so overjoyed because I went down there to register her. I’ve been on tour and been busy, busy, busy, and this is my last time toting mattresses and sofas and doing the real daddy thing. To see my baby making A’s and B’s and majoring in psychology…

Dre [would] always be like, “I love how you just buckled down.” Like, “Man, goddamn you’re serious about that daddy s**t.” I’m blessed that God put me on this path. It also brought a sense of restraint. Just not being out here wilding.

Did recording and writing feel more like a job after that? Like, “This is how I have to provide for my family?”
Absolutely not! This is not a job, this is a way of life. If you look at this s**t like a job, are you an artist? Sometimes it might seem like hard work, because I really put a lot of time into my pen space. I’m serious about my craft. But it’s not a job — if anything, it brought more joy into my life, more sense of purpose. That’s why nobody can’t f**k with me now: I’m the baddest motherf**ker on the planet. Believe it! Jedi rap s**t all day!

It’s been talked about a lot, but at the Source Awards in 1995, when OutKast got booed and Dre said, “The South’s got something to say” — did that event fuel you guys to prove that rap in the South was just as vital and important as what was going on on the coasts?
I call it the rap civil war. We were the first ones to break through to the North and have them respect us as MC’s, our craft, our ability to write lyrics, and have bars. They had to respect it. He spoke it at the award show because they booed, but we didn’t give a f**k. It pissed us off, and they shouldn’t have did that, because it fueled us and threw gas on the fire. But we were already thinking that, because we had to fight so hard to be recognized.

Going along with that, on “Two Dope Boyz (In A Cadillac)” you claim that you only rap “to prove a point.” What were you trying to prove?
The point that we were proving is that we’ll eat your ass up. We some real MCs. Black dog and black wolf is what they called us in high school. Just lyrically dominant, and it’s still about that. I stay recording and I’m halfway done with my next solo record, which someone is saying is one of my best records ever — it’s some of my best work to date. I think it’s going to shock a lot of people.

On “13th Floor/Growing Old,”  you talk about phonies pretending to be pimps riding around in a Mercedes-Benz. Were there that many phony rappers around at that time?
You know, I take a page out of KRS-One’s book: You can entertain and educate at the same time. Give them a little bit of soul food in there, you know? It’s okay to party and make all the party records in the world, but once you start to make people think, then you really got their attention.

I think one thing that [demonstrated] that whole state of mind is when we did “Git Up, Git Out.” A countless amount of people around the world were like, “That song motivated me to go to college.” “That song helped me get off drugs.” “That song helped me be a better person.” We didn’t know about that when we were making it. It was just our mind state. But to know it affected people’s lives like that? There’s a sense of responsibility.

Can you talk about how the process for the recording of ATLiens came together?
We went on tour and Organized Noize rented out the top floor of the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta. They were camped out in there with all kinds of beat machines, and by the time we came home, they had already started laying the foundations to the album. By that time, we also had already started producing songs like “Elevators.” We learned from being under them for so long. What better way to paint a picture than being able to create the soundscape for your words? We were maturing and coming of age then. Just trying to figure out, “Where are we going?”

Organized Noize are one of the most respected production teams in rap history. What did you learn from them and what did you think of the material that they presented to you when you came off tour?
Organized Noize is the Jedi Council. They brought us in and molded us. To this day, I still work in close quarters with the members of Organized Noize. Me and Ray Murray are great partners. He’s camped out at Stankonia Studios, my studio, every day. From all my solo work to the Big Grams album, there’s always been an Organized Noize presence. Sleepy Brown, he lives in Vegas now, but he comes to Atlanta. He’s all over my next record. We just learn from each other and try to make the best music possible.

The production of five of the tracks on ATLiens are credited to both you and André. Can you talk about your philosophy as a producer?
It has to have feeling in it. When you’re listening to a track, before you put a word on it, it has to make you feel a certain way to inspire those words. There’s no competition about it at all. The only people we competed with is ourselves individually. It’s like Dre said on “Mighty O,” you’re running from a shadow because you’re competing with yourself. That’s how you push yourself to be better.

Two of the biggest standouts from this album were produced you and Dre: the title track and “Elevators.” How did you build both of those tracks?
A lot of those things just come from casual conversation. Just beating on the beat machine, tinkering around with little stuff in the studio, finding a rhythm, and then we’d just kinda sit there…I really wish we had, like, eight Go-Pros in the studio so I could look back at and see how the moments and things, how stuff happens. It’s truly magical in the sense of… the s**t comes. That’s why I say it’s a gift. It’s not forced, contrived, or nothing.

I read that you guys went out and bought an MPC3000, an ASR-10 synthesizer, a Tascam mixing board, and a drum machine to create the beats. Does that sound right?
Yeah, we both bought our equipment at the same time. When we did our publishing deal that was the first time we got some real paper and we went and invested in ourselves. We wanted equipment, we wanted to make beats, and we set up our home studios in our apartments, and Dre at his dad’s house. That’s when Dre was rolling me like 30 blunts a day. I didn’t even know how to roll a blunt and he taught me how. We would just be in there, smoked out, just banging on s**t.

It’s said that you guys recorded something like 35 songs for this record and then eventually whittled it down to 15. What happened to the rest of that material?
A lot of it trickled down into other records. That’s the thing about making timeless classics. There’s no expiration date on it. Some songs that didn’t make Southernplayalistic ended up on ATLiens, some songs that didn’t make it onto ATLiens ended up on the next record, and the next record. I know “West Savannah” [from 1998’s Aquemini] was on an earlier record and came out later.

In contrast to most of your later albums, ATLiens has a much darker, more intense vibe throughout the songs. Is it safe to call this your “serious record?”
I wouldn’t say serious; I think it was a mature evolution. We didn’t know what the music business was. We were just two young cats that wanted to destroy everything we got on. Once we started traveling, doing interviews, being in front of the TV, you started to know the system. From that comes maturity. You’re also going from a teenager to being 20 and you’re looking at life differently because you’re having different experiences. It wasn’t more serious, but we weren’t kids anymore. A lot of people don’t realize that we’ve been doing this for so long, but we started so young — like, 16 years old.

Being that it was such a tremendous shift away from the sound of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, were you at all worried that your fans wouldn’t accept ATLiens like they did?
We weren’t worried, the label was. They didn’t even like “Elevators.” They were like, “Y’all crazy!” We said, “F**k that s**t,” and took it to the radio station against everybody’s wishes and it blew up. From that point on, L.A. Reid let us pick all our singles.

You and André have such a unique way of weaving around each other’s verses. Can you talk about your writing process a bit? How you break up a song? Did you guys write eye-to-eye?
Southernplayalistic was definitely eye-to-eye. One person would get far and be like, “I got it!” And then it’d be like, “Go ahead and lay it.” Then I’d do my part. “Oh s**t!” You’re inspiring your partner, bouncing that energy back and forth. That’s what makes the group so unf**kwithable. You have two sides of the same coin with different points of view. The s**t fun, man.

The Cadillac is like the official car brand of OutKast — it’s in the title of your first album, you’ve got “Two Dope Boyz (In A Cadillac)” on ATLiens. How many have you owned over your life?
Cadillacs? I’ve had a ’90 Brougham… Dre bought a baby-blue ’90 Brougham, and then I bought a root-beer-colored ’90 Brougham and I loved it. I ended up giving it to my grandma, so then I bought a ’79 Seville — canary yellow. It’s in my mom’s garage right now. I’m about to pull that bitch out before it gets cold outside! [Laughs.]

So I’ve had two Cadillacs, but then I got into Chevy. So I have a 1960, ’61, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65 Impalas. Killer Mike swindled me out of my 1960 mint-green Impala, and I sold him a Red ’63 Impala. We’d be on the bus in some kind of way after everybody got a drink and [he’d] be like, “Lemme buy that car from you.” Then he’d give me the money on the bus, and when we’d get home, the car would be gone. So he got me two times, but he won’t get me again! Then he sent me all the pictures of the new paint job and the motor and s**t; I don’t wanna see that s**t.

Have you been working with him at all lately?
Boy, absolutely! Wait until you hear this new s**t. Killer Mike is busy as hell. I mean, he’ll come straight from the airport and go into the studio and bust on two or three records and come back again the next day. We’re just trying to put as many ideas out there as possible. And me and Killer Mike, we’re gonna put out a little EP after I put out my next solo record or something like that. We’ve been entertaining the idea for a long time and finally got enough songs to where we just said the other night that we’re gonna do it. You getting a scoop there.

Getting back to ATLiens, when it finally dropped in 1996, it went No. 2 overall on the charts, was certified double-platinum, and is now widely considered to be one of the greatest rap albums of all time. What did that kind of success feel like, and how did it impact the way you approached the next album, Aquemini?
I don’t think we really realized how big ATLiens was until we put out Aquemini. It’s like the following was growing and growing and growing. We sold over a million records every time. The ATLiens album just spoke to people. People who were in our same age group [who] were teenagers during Southernplayalistic followed us to ATLiens. They were on that same journey.

If you had to pick a favorite song or a favorite verse from ATLiens, what would you choose?
That’s like trying to pick which one of my kids is the best kid. It’s all one thing. Day to day it might change, depending on the mood I’m in. One day it might be “Wheelz of Steel.” One of my favorites is “Ova Da Wudz” because I love how we did lyrical gymnastics all over that bitch. But, you know, it changes from day to day. I just put my iPod on shuffle.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

On September 15, 2015, nearly 20 years after it was first released, GZA finally received a platinum record in the mail from the RIAA for his seminal ‘90s masterpiece Liquid Swords. “It’s a good feeling,” he said of the honor. “It took a while.” No kidding.

When it debuted in November of 1995, Liquid Swords — one of SPIN‘s 300 Best Albums of the Last 30 Years —  was part and parcel of a larger plan put into place by the members of the mighty Staten Island-based rap collective known as the Wu-Tang Clan (and its leader, RZA) to take over the rap game. It all began with the collective’s 1993 full-length debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), and was expanded over the next few years with the solo releases of Method Man’s Tical, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, and Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… All three of those solo albums clearly have their own signature flavors and motifs, but hardly any of them could match the cinematic flair, the tight and cohesive thematic strain, or the dense lyrical verbiage of Liquid Swords — the best-remembered LP from the group’s most famously verbose member, familiarly known as the Genius.

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In honor of Liquid Swords‘ 20th anniversary, SPIN recently hopped on the phone with GZA, an MC with one of the most formidable arsenals of words in hip-hop history, to talk about how the record came together, and to walk us through the process of creating his singular rhymes.

Liquid Swords was your second solo record, but your first after solidifying the Wu-Tang Clan and releasing Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). How did your approach change between Words From the Genius in 1991 to this record in 1995?

I don’t think that the approach had really changed at all. I just think that the subject matter had broadened.

What was on your mind at the time that you were making Liquid Swords?

Everything. I get inspired by many different things. It can be an object, it can be a person; there were many things on my mind when I started working on this album. I really, really wanted to show my lyrical ability and my storytelling style and it felt like I had certain things to prove because of [promotional issues] in the past from the prior label I was on [Cold Chillin’ Records]. So I felt that I needed to just slash back.

You’ve been credited as having one of the largest vocabularies in rap history by unique word count. Do you make a conscious effort to try and incorporate a lot of different words into your writing or does that just come naturally?

It’s just kind of me. It’s always been like that since we were teenagers when we formed our first group called All in Together with RZA, [Ol’] Dirty [Bastard], and myself. Emceeing has always been about making the most intellectual, most creative, wittiest rhyme as possible regardless of any subject. It was always about bringing the best out of yourself.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9oKUu1fO9KM

There’s always been this competitive spirit within the Wu-Tang Clan. How has that impacted the way your write and record?

In different ways… I mean, when you have nine members within a group and they’re all in the studio writing to the beat, there’s a lot of pressure, so the competition is always there and it helps you advance. Sometimes you might hear a rhyme like, you know, for instance, when I heard [Inspectah] Deck’s verse on “Triumph” [from Forever in 1997] it was hard to follow that.

RZA has mentioned in past interviews about his vision for the Clan to reach different sets of demographics with each of the individual solo records and mentioned that Liquid Swords was an effort to reach the college crowd. Did you buy into that?

No. He may have said that, but that just wasn’t my aim, to get college kids. I mean, I think as an artist the overall goal is to teach and educate no matter what the song is about. Somewhere where a listener can get something out of it, something that can give them help to move forward, help them learn something, analyze something in a different way, or think about something.

It may just have been that college kids were more interested in learning and dissecting and researching and trying to figure it out. That’s just how it unfolded, but that wasn’t really part of the plan. I strive to get everyone.

Is there a group of people that you think this record doesn’t really speak to?

With the profanity on it, I would say that it’s not suitable for children or young kids… You know, at one time I stopped using profanity on lyrics. I mean, it was many, many years ago, but I had a line off 2002’s Legend of the Liquid Sword album where I said, “I’m the obscene slang kicker, with no parental sticker / Advising y’all that wise words are much slicker.” It would be a universal record as far as hip-hop though, with the beats and the way the rhymes are put together and the style of it and the certain things I’m speaking about.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zZtS1BzdNpw

What was it about the film Shogun Assassin, which was sampled for the opening of the record that resonated so much with you? When did you first see that one?

You might be surprised by this answer, but I don’t think that I watched the movie until after the Liquid Swords album [was released].

So including the dialogue from that film came purely from RZA, then?

Yeah, RZA did that in the last stages of the album. We were actually beyond mixing the album, the album was mixed already and we were mastering the album and he sent the engineer out or someone from the studio and said, “Bring me back Shogun Assassin,” and threw it on the album. That came at the very last minute.

Can you talk about your relationship with RZA, how you two collaborate as writers and how he approaches you as a producer?

I think the chemistry is great. Before RZA started producing he was a DJ… well, a DJ, an MC, and a beatboxer. So was Dirty. As far as myself, I was just an MC and I did a little graffiti back in the day, but I wasn’t one of the great artists who had their name and work walls posted all over the neighborhood and stuff. But before RZA was a producer, he was an MC, then he became a producer but he was also a human beat box specialist.

Plus we were in a group together as teenagers. We were always rhyming and battling so we kind of knew each other’s style and flow well. He was aware of that going into this project and the chemistry is great. And him being an MC, he would sometimes ask me to switch a rhyme around, throw a line in there, ask me if I could say something in a different way or if I could change the flow of it. I understood a majority of the time where he was coming from.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QFjGd2s8ndo

You have a unique and frankly dense storytelling method. How do you put together something like “Gold,” which is about coming up through the criminal underground? There’s a lot of metaphor in that song.

It’s just an urban street tale and when I want to tell an urban street tale, I try and tell it from a different perspective than the average way you would hear a story. I have different ways of doing it, like on “Clan in Da Front.” I’m not a sports person, but every now and then I incorporate sports in my rhymes because I’m always grabbing from certain things and getting inspired by something whether I’m totally involved in it or not. So on “Clan in Da Front” there’s a line where I say, “I’m on the mound, G, and it’s a no-hitter / And my DJ the catcher, he’s my man…” That’s more braggadocios.

But on “Gold” I’m like, “I’m deep down in the back streets, in the heart of Medina / About to set off something more deep than a misdemeanor…” So it’s really about hustling and street activity, but it’s just told in a different way.

Speaking about doing songs in a different way, how did you get the idea to open “Cold World” in a “Night Before Christmas” framework?

That’s just how my mind thinks. The great thing about writing is that you create your own world and you bring listeners into your world depending on what you write. I’m always hearing something or seeing something that has some sort of inspiration in it. Even if it’s not so good, I can try and pull the good or the beauty out of it. I just thought it was a cool start for that story.

Every single member of the Wu-Tang Clan is present on Liquid Swords in one way or another. Was there a conscious effort made to include everyone?

It’s always great to have the help and support from your brothers, especially within the Clan… I was always open to having anyone and it was the early stage of Wu, and thought it would be great to have a member on the album, but I didn’t necessarily want to depend on that to complete an album. You know, nowadays artists put out albums and they have 50 different features or guest appearances on the album and it kind of overshadows them sometimes. As an MC for so long, we were used to holding our own weight.

The album I did before Liquid Swords, Words from the Genius, didn’t have any Clan members on it even though they existed at that time. RZA wasn’t on it, Dirty wasn’t on it. I approached the album with open space for any of my Clan brothers to get on, but if not, I had to be able to fill that space.

How collaborative are you as a writer?

There are certain lines that I’ve taken from other artists. I mean, on “Living in the World Today,” the second verse, some of that came from RZA. Like, “My preliminary attack keep cemeteries packed,” that came from RZA. Then on “Cold World,” there’s a line where I say, “And it does sound ill like wars in Brownsville / Or fatal robberies in Red Hook where Feds look.” I got “Red Hook” and “Feds look” and “Brownsville” and “sounds of steel” from [Killa] Priest and then I happened to put them into a sentence. I’ve taken little lines and pieces from some of my brothers.

You know there’s a saying that two heads are better than one. I’m used to writing alone, but a lot of times it helps out if you have another MC around you because he can feed stuff to you.

Liquid Swords is very cohesive, both in theme and overall sound. Was that more of a byproduct of your headspace at the time or did it end up like that from RZA’s input as the producer?

It was a combination of both… the beats have to complement the rhymes, and the rhymes have to complement the beats. It’s just my job to make it cohesive lyrically and make everything fit, not just telling a story, but weaving a tale. That’s just my approach to lyrics in general. I’m always trying to make it tighter and tighter, draft and draft, then re-draft and re-draft over and over. I change sentences; I change words until I feel it’s right. And then, even after I feel it’s right, several years later I revisit it and say, “Well, I could have said that like this,” because I’m always growing and developing.

You’ve described this album in the past as being cinematic in scope, and you’ve used cinematic terms when describing it. You also directed music videos for four of the songs off Liquid Swords. What is it about the medium of film that inspires you musically and makes you think about it from that level?

Well, film is a visual thing, you know? And rap is a visual language. It’s about creating the most visual rhyme you can create because when someone is listening they have to be able to draw pictures in their own head. You just strive to make the rhyme as visual as possible. You want to make it cinematic.

When people talk about this record — as well as a lot of those other great mid-‘90s Wu-Tang records — the word that comes up a lot is “gritty.” What do you think it is about that sound and the themes you guys mined that has endured in the minds of so many people for so many years?

Timing was one. It was something new and something fresh. Something unheard of in that way. I mean, there’s nothing new under the sun, but there’s always different ways of approaching something or revising something. I think the grittiness is just a part of where we come from. You know, rough, rugged around the edges. It’s rap and maybe not nowadays, but the origin of it was rugged and rigid and gritty.

What songs off of Liquid Swords do you think hold up the most for you today and what songs do you like performing the most live?

I like performing “Liquid Swords.” I like performing “Duel of the Iron Mic.” That’s one of my favorites. “4th Chamber” because of its energy and the guitars and the whole crazy-sounding rock sort of thing. That’s one of the songs we perform whether I’m solo or with Wu. It’s maybe one of two or three songs that the crowd is at its hypest and sometimes we stop it after ten seconds and play it back just to get more of a reaction from the crowd.

It’s been reported for years that you ghostwrote a lot of the verses to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s record Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version. Is there any truth to that?

There is. I mean, I’ve used a little bit of Dirty’s stuff also, but the thing with the rhymes that were on Dirty’s album was that these were rhymes that were written when I was a teenager and those rhymes didn’t really suit or fit me at the time and Dirty had a way of taking stuff and making it his own. It just fit him more than it fit me. One of the rhymes [from “Don’t You Know”] he says, “Sittin’ in my class at a quarter to ten / Waiting patiently for the class to begin / The teacher says student please open your texts / And read the first paragraph on oral sex.” I wrote that as a teenager! So by the time I was doing Words from the Genius or Liquid Swords, I didn’t want to be kicking those rhymes. It would have been more of a Fresh Prince thing to me. Not to take from him or disrespect him, but that was his kind of style.

After you released Liquid Swords you shortly thereafter started working on Wu-Tang Forever with the whole Clan and then went on the infamous tour with Rage Against the Machine in 1997 that ended rather abruptly. What happened that caused that particular tour to break up before the end?

I don’t really know what it was. We were on tour and then we were doing the Summer Jam concert and we had to miss a show and…we didn’t have to leave the tour but we had to miss a show or two to do the Summer Jam thing. We voted on it and some of us said we shouldn’t do it, and some of us thought we should do it, and we ended up doing that. It ended up turning out to be a disaster in one way for us to even do that show but somehow we didn’t go back on the Rage tour. For what reason I do not know. We weren’t kicked off the tour, it was our decision to not… I mean, not mine personally because I just would have stayed on tour and kept rocking. We were rocking in front of big crowds, there was great response and you know, it was just the decision and it didn’t work out.

What can you say at the moment about your upcoming record, Dark Matter? You posted a photo on Instagram recently in the studio with Vangelis, the composer of Chariots of Fire.

I think that this is going to be a very, very great one, maybe the strongest by far. Lyrically, definitely. I’m still working on it, but the musical approach is quite different now that Vangelis is in the picture.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Many came to know the Flaming Lips via the Vaseline-happy fluke hit “She Don’t Use Jelly” from 1993 and their 1999 full-length magnum opus The Soft Bulletin a few years later, which acted as their “Creep” and OK Computer respectively in the public and critical eye. But in between was 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic, their very own The Bends (released the same year even). It marked a transition from the acid-spiked guitar rock the Lips had purveyed for over a decade and the experimental orchestral bombast that would follow.

The album didn’t have any big hits, though its closing hymn “Bad Days” ended up in Batman Forever, and songs like “Christmas at the Zoo,” “This Here Giraffe” and “Evil Will Prevail” helped point a band of fractured, ragtag Oklahomans toward the more beautiful precincts they still explore even today on this year’s surprisingly McCartney-esque Miley Cyrus collaboration. For its 20th anniversary, SPIN spoke to Lips leader Wayne Coyne about how Clouds furthered the band’s divergence toward artistic success that no one could have predicted at the time.

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What do you think of Clouds Taste Metallic 20 years later?
We’ve discovered as we’ve gone along, that as you’re making [records] you love them but almost immediately as you put them out you start to be like, “Ugh, I’m uncomfortable with that.” It gets to be a couple years old, and it feels like you’re not that person anymore, so you kind of reject it. But, we discovered that as the record got to be, like, ten years old, you really did separate from it, and didn’t really think, “Oh that’s not even me doing it, even though it was.” Speaking of myself as if it’s some other entity, I love it, yeah.

Were there any bizarre expectations on you guys after performing on 90210?
I think we’ve probably made them larger on ourselves than anybody else did. We had already been around for quite a while then — we formed in 1983. We’d seen other bands that we felt like were in our same sphere have to take the next step up, or forced to kind of contend with money and popularity and all these things. We’ve seen a lot of people embrace it badly and destroy their group, and by then, we had already done a couple of things that we thought, “Oh, we didn’t really like that, why’d we do that?” Then other things we thought that we were gonna hate that we really loved, and we were starting to become a little bit more relaxed about the absurdity of being in a group, and accepting the fun parts of becoming more popular. And you know, trying to not feel like, “Well, since we have this hit we should make more hits like that.” I think at the time we even said, “We don’t really know why people like that one.” It would be impossible for us to do it again – we don’t really know what we did. [Laughs.]

Did you know at the time that it was going to be the last record that you made with guitarist Ronald Jones?
While we were making it, the things that we know about him now, there’s no way we could have known that then. I think we’d already finished the record by the time he had announced that he was gonna quit, and then he still played a few of the shows. Probably for a year after that it still felt like, well, he might come back. So it was never an immediate death in the family so to speak. I didn’t really feel like Steven [Drozd, Flaming Lips multi-instrumentalist] and I were that compatible with Ronald. I think we loved what he did but if we had to go his way, I don’t think we would’ve made records like that at all. I think that was us, Steven and I, struggling and saying, “I think we’re gonna try to do this,” and doing everything we could to incorporate his stuff into that. So, it was beautiful but it was not easy.

Wasn’t that a hint that it might not work out with him?
No, I mean, if he would’ve stayed in the group, we probably would’ve just said, “This is a great group, let’s figure out what to do about that.” Him leaving wasn’t anything that we wanted; he decided to leave. But like I said, once he had left, Steven and I would say, “Well, man, this is a lot more fun… with him not being here.” I remember after Clouds Taste Metallic, Ronald talked about changing a part to a song that was on [1993’s] Transmissions from the Satellite Heart that had come out three years earlier. I’m like, “We’re already done with that.” How do we go back and redo it, you know? But I love that about him as well. He had no common sense about it. It was purely that he loves music and music loves him.

Where did the title Clouds Taste Metallic come from?
We’re friends with the group Tool, and went on tour with them in Australia. We went out with the bass player [Paul D’Amour] who’s no longer with them, and he would be telling us stories. They went up with a pilot friend of theirs in one of these airplanes where the seats are open. You’re strapped in and there’s no roof on it, the guy is flying them around and they said, “Hey man, let’s just go through that cloud.” When they went through the cloud this guy opened up his mouth because he wanted to have clouds in his mouth. And he literally said that: “You know, it’s weird, clouds taste metallic.”

What song title on the record had the best inside joke behind it?
There’s a lot of good titles on there. I really love the title “Psychiatric Exploration of a Fetus With Needles,” it’s just so absurd. I don’t know what the f–k it means but that’s what this song is.

Do you typically have a title before you write the song?
Sometimes I’ll come up with songs [where] the song itself doesn’t really say what it’s about but the title does, and sometimes it’s the other way around, where the title doesn’t say anything but the song says everything. Sometimes you just have songs where a title is exactly what it should be, like “Do You Realize??” It’s like, “Well that’s the name of the song! There’s nothing more that we have to say about it.” I don’t think any of the titles felt as good as [“Psychiatric Explorations”], but “The Abandoned Hospital Ship” is a pretty great title. It just gives you this sort of mood before you even hear it. It seemed like a scene out of a movie.

Do you have a favorite song on the record?
Probably. We do play “Abandoned Hospital Ship” even now. We did a Clouds Taste Metallic concert in February and I think a lot of them are really dynamic, fun songs to play. I’d like to say probably “Evil Will Prevail.” It was a slightly different song and then right at the end we totally reworked it. It seemed like a way of making songs that, instead of knowing exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, we could try a bunch of different things. We liked it one way and then we liked it another way, and I think I remember saying, “Why can’t we put out like three versions of the same song?”

Was “Evil Will Prevail” the beginning of the obsession with good and evil that you’d go on to explore on The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi?
We were starting to get away from songs that were freaky but didn’t have any emotional content, you know? As much as a song like “Psychiatric Exploration” is fun, there’s not an emotional thing in it. We were starting to have a desire for that to drive us with our music. Earlier incarnations of the Flaming Lips just weren’t good at playing anything, let alone purposely doing emotional music. We would stumble upon things that were emotional but we didn’t know how to do them again. The Soft Bulletin was almost pure emotion, which I’m thankful for, ‘cause I think we really were lucky that we were so drunk on our stupid ideas that we actually stumbled upon some that were good.

Doesn’t a song like “Christmas at the Zoo” fall between the wackiness and the emotion? It has that weird premise but also a euphoric feeling with weight to it.
Yeah, you’re exactly right. We would have these things in the music but we wouldn’t always be able to realize them in the song at that time. You have to do the song in the time that you have. It’s better to get something out of your system that you don’t like, than keep it in your system and not know that you don’t like it.

Do you have a least favorite song on the record?
I think our least favorite one was “They Punctured My Yolk.” When we went to play it at the Clouds Taste Metallic show in February, it [became] one of our favorites after we changed the arrangement — it was still that song but just a more fun, dynamic arrangement. It turned out to be probably the highlight of the night to tell you the truth. The song that we didn’t like, we changed it to something that we absolutely like.

What was the label’s reaction when you turned in the record?
I think they always would just, you know, peek into what we were doing and be like, “There they go. That’s on time and they’re making a f–king cool record.” I think there was a lot of great effort by them to say, “If we let those guys do their thing, I think they’re gonna really do some cool stuff.” We didn’t know we were gonna do Zaireeka or Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. We just thought, “F–k, we’re just figuring stuff out, let us try.” And I think they had a good sense of that.

Was there any issue with there not being another obvious “She Don’t Use Jelly”?
Well, I don’t know. No one ever came to us even with “She Don’t Use Jelly” and thought, “Oh, this is obvious,” you know? I think it started to work little by little. And we had the song “Bad Days,” which, because it was connected to that Batman movie, was actually bigger and sold more records and copies than “She Don’t Use Jelly.”

How did “Bad Days” end up on the Batman Forever soundtrack?
While we were working on Clouds Taste Metallic, they wanted a song and it was the only song that we really had and said, “What do you think of this?” They actually loved it, and built the scene in the movie around the song. We were on this crazy giant record with U2 and Seal, who was a big pop artist at time. Then we were thinking we didn’t want “Bad Days” on Clouds Taste Metallic and on the record itself there’s a big gap, then it comes up at the end. They were like, “Hey, you’ve got to put this song on there — everybody loves this song.” And we were like, “Oh, you can hear it on the Batman soundtrack.” And they’re like, “No, no, you better have it on your record, too.” And I think they were definitely right.

Even by ‘90s standards, isn’t that soundtrack one of the weirdest batches of artists?
I think it set up a blueprint that you could really have an interesting soundtrack that really doesn’t have that much to do with the movie and people would accept it. It was just a record that had another branding that went with it. I thought that was really a cool move, that it didn’t always just have to be a group of popular artists doing something to promote the movie. It really was a weird mixtape collection that had a movie with it too.

What did you think of the finished movie?
Of all the Batman movies it’s probably the one I like the least. But I do remember being in the theater and when our scene came up, and we jumped up and said, “Yeah, motherf–kers!”

You liked it even less than Batman and Robin — the George Clooney one?
Well, maybe not.

Do you consider Clouds to be the end of an era?
I think Steven and I would say it is now. That that was the peak of when we thought of ourselves as a rock band — loud guitars. He played drums and I sang and played guitar and that was what we were doing. And we got to where we just wouldn’t do that anymore. But luckily we followed our desires to be something different.

Do you have any other anniversary plans for the album?
We’re doing this big, four-record set that’s got a live show from Seattle and also a collection of oddities that were around then; I don’t know if they’ve all been released. You can find them on some pretty deep Flaming Lips sites out there, but there’re some things that we’ve never put out. And I think there’s a pretty good documentary in the works about it but, we don’t have all that done yet.

Now that it’s coming up to the anniversaries of some of your best-loved work, it would be amazing to have the reissues include, like, Zaireeka-style versions, separating the tracks for other albums like Clouds or Soft Bulletin.
You saying that does make me consider that, maybe that would be something that people would be interested in. Why don’t we put these ideas out there and see if people are really interested in them? I am, but I don’t always know if just because I’m interested that means it’s interesting.

Or you could always return to the gummy realm.
[Laughs.] I don’t know that we’ll do that any time real soon but, you know, we love all that s–t.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Shirley Manson refers to herself a “truth-seeker.” “I’ve been taught that when people ask, ‘How are you,’ they’re not looking to hear how you actually are,” she explains over the phone. Total honesty is a societal rule she admits to breaking most of the time. On the plus side, her urge to be frank is part of what’s kept Garbage — which also comprises bassist/guitarist Duke Erikson, guitarist Steve Marker, and drummer/renowned producer Butch Vig — relevant for two decades.

Imbuing their material with an experimental smattering of ’90s trend genres (trip-hop, techno, and grunge), the alterna-pop pioneers’ 1995 self-titled debut comes packed with Manson’s self-prostrating verses: “I’m only happy when it rains,” “Stupid girl / All you had you wasted,” “This is not my idea of a good time.”

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In the beginning, though, it was the Scotland native’s startling visual presentation — crimson hair, heavy-lidded gaze, vaguely apathetic demeanor — in U.K. goth-rock outfit Angelfish that inspired Erikson, Steve Marker, and Vig to invite Manson to audition for Garbage, which in 1994 was essentially a small-time studio project in Madison, Wisconsin. Then, with a push from MTV and Top 40 radio, the group went on to sell more than four million copies of Garbage worldwide, and today the quartet are due to release the album’s 20th anniversary re-mastered edition this fall, which will feature remixes and previously unreleased demos of songs.

In celebration of this and their forthcoming 20 Years Queer tour, we called up Manson and Vig separately to talk memories of their breakthrough album and why Manson has always felt like an “outsider” in the band.

Shirley, what was it like for you when Duke, Steve, and Butch invited you to audition for Garbage in 1994? 

Shirley Manson: I remember getting a phone call. I was literally doing dishes. I had on rubber gloves, and it was 7:00 p.m. at night. The call was from my A&R guy, [Phil Schuster]. He said there’s a producer in America who’s been inquiring about you. His name is Butch Vig. I was like, “Uh-huh. And what do you mean ‘inquiring?'” He said, “Well, he wants to work with you. He’s interested in recording a song with you.” I was like, “OK, well, who is this guy?” Phil said, “Well, you should go back and listen to your Nirvana record, or Sonic Youth, or Smashing Pumpkins. You’ll see his name on those records.” [They were] records Phil knew I loved.

What was your reaction once you realized that it was the Butch Vig asking after you?

SM: I was squealing, I couldn’t believe it. I was just like, “How could this possibly happening to me?” [Butch] had this incredible, cool, eclectic discography, and I was really flattered. I still am, actually, truth be told.

Butch, what was it about Shirley that struck you in the beginning?

Butch Vig: We felt like we had met a kindred spirit. Her sensibility, her wanting to fight for the underdog. We liked similar kinds of music and film. She had never really had the chance to be a full contributor as a songwriter [in earlier bands Angelfish and Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie]. We kind of threw her in the hot seat. We had a lot of songs that were basically music jams with fragmented lyric ideas that Duke, Steve, and I had come up with, and we kind of forced Shirley to go in the studio and finish them.

Was she nervous? 

The very first [session], she had a rough go of it. We weren’t really sure if it was going to work. She went back to Scotland, but she called Duke two weeks later saying, “I think I know what to do on some of these songs.”

What was the recording set up like then? 

BV: We were set up at Steve’s house recording in his basement. Duke, Steve, and I sat downstairs and we would roll these tracks — “Vow” or “Queer,” whatever they were — they weren’t finished but they were pretty far along, so she had an idea of what the song sounded like. We were like, “OK, well, just make something up, Shirley.”

What did Shirley eventually add to the mix that you felt was missing? 

BV: The demo versions that we had, we tended to distort our vocals and sing them really aggressively. Shirley was kind of doing the opposite — [she sang them] kind of understated. On “Queer” and “Stupid Girl,” there’s sort of this languid undercurrent in there. There’s a tension in it. When she started singing, it was really understated. In fact, sometimes the more understated she sang, the more tense the track sounded. That’s one of the things we really loved that she brought to those early versions of the songs.

Shirley, what was the Garbage tryout process like? 

SM: I went down to London and I met them. We had a meeting there in a hotel, which, ironically — it’s a story that that’s been told a million times, but it bears retelling — it was the night that Kurt Cobain killed himself. [Ed. note: This would have been the night Cobain’s body was discovered in his Seattle home.] That was the night I met the boys. When I got to the house I was staying with that night, it was all over the news. Of course I immediately thought, “Wow, this is going to devastate Butch.”

From that point on, they came and saw me play on tour with my band Angelfish. I was touring in the States with Vic Chesnutt. They came and saw me play in Chicago, we hung out that night, and we really liked each other. Then finally, they asked me to record with them in Madison for one day. It was a bit of a fiasco — it didn’t go very well. So then they asked if I would be interested in coming back one more time and making the recording happen.

BV: [Laughs.] Did Shirley tell you this story? She was pushing Vic in his wheelchair down Clark Street in Chicago. It was January. We’d had a few cocktails. She hit a curb and he flew out of his wheelchair into the street. She was mortified, but Vic was totally laughing at the time.

Butch, why’d you bring Shirley back after the first failed attempt at recording? 

BV: To be honest, the very first session that she did, Duke and Steve and I were not very organized. We probably could have sat down to play her some songs and describe them a little bit, but we literally would cue up a track and say, “OK, try something.”

We couldn’t even see her. We set up a microphone in Steve’s living room and ran some cables down through the stairs into the basement, and so we would finish it, and she’d sing in starts and stops and there’d be silence, and Duke, Steve and I would look at each other, terrified. We’d say, “Shirley, do you want to try that again?” She’d go [imitates Scottish accent], “I don’t know what you want me to do.” We couldn’t understand her Scottish accent. So there was a little bit of a language barrier on that first day.

Personally, I remember I felt discouraged. I thought in the back of my head it would all go really easily, that she would come up with these great lyrics and great melodies, and we’d go into the studio and in a week or so finish a lot of the songs. But it didn’t happen that way. It was a slow courting process.

Shirley, did you feel a lot of pressure to impress, especially singing for a producer who had worked with Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins? 

SM: It was horrifically intimidating. I don’t know if the band ever really understood that. I’ve always been an outsider. I am still an outsider in Garbage. I’m the odd one out by default. I’m the only girl, I’m younger than they are, they’ve all known each other for 40 years, or something crazy like that. So I always felt, like, off the center of things. I felt incredibly lucky and incredibly grateful, which is appropriate, but also incredibly destructive in my own already small amount of self-belief. I didn’t believe deep down that I had any talent. I had never written a song at this point, so I was shaking in my shoes, literally. It took arguably 20 years for me to actually feel like I deserved to be sitting in that seat.

What were you listening to at the time of recording Garbage?

BV: We loved punk and new wave. I know Shirley’s a big fan of Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sioux. Kate Bush, also. Steve brought in a Public Enemy record right before we started Garbage, and I just got fascinated with the sound of those records. I realized they were using samplers, and yet they sounded more scary and more rock’n’roll to me than a lot of the rock’n’roll records I was listening to. We loved Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead. I still love My Bloody Valentine. That was one of the influences on the guitar playing that Duke and Steve brought in.

We would also listen to Frank Sinatra records. Shirley grew up listening to musicals, as did I. My mom was a music teacher, so every night we’d have dinner and there’d be some musical on in our house: West Side Story, or Oklahoma or whatever.

Shirley, given your insecurities at the time, did you find it strange how girls idolized you as a fashion icon the ’90s?

SM: We should never listen to our feelings. They lead us astray. I’m looking at old archival footage that we shot on the first tour, and I know how I felt then. And yet I’m looking at myself on these videos, and I seem really self-assured and confident. It was at odds with how I was feeling inside. The good news was, somehow or another, my mother taught me to push through my fear, always. Feel the fear and do it anyway. So I’m grateful for that sort of streak that I had. I spent the entire first decade with Garbage incredibly uncomfortable and always riddled with self-doubt.

Did you ever have journalists coming up to you asking, “Shirley, are you OK?”

SM: All the time.

How’d you respond?

I’d say, “Yeah, I’m OK, thank you for asking.” If you’re a truth-seeker, which I am — and you clearly are too — all your life, you’re fighting to hear the truth. Then you see all the masks that everybody wears — whether they want you to see them or not. It’s almost like a weird sixth sense. Like, I can meet people and within seconds get an idea of what’s going on with them, even if they’re saying nice things and laughing and acting happy as clowns. I haven’t always understood that not everybody’s like me, and they don’t think like I do. They only want to see a pretty picture. Whereas I like pretty things, but I also want to peel away the beautiful picture and see the substance beneath it.

How does that affect your relationships?

SM: I was always looking at my relationships with other people with regards to what I wanted, and what I wasn’t getting from them, without understanding that some people don’t want that deep connection. They’re not interested in it. It scares them or it repulses them, or they’re bored by it. And that took me a long time to understand. I was always thinking, “Well, why don’t people want me to study them and adore them and obsess over them? Why would they want me to treat them cheaply and superficially?” It’s how they operate. It’s no better or worse than I operate, it’s just very different. You get your heart broken all the time. I don’t mean romantically. But in terms of when I meet people and I see the walls go up, it’s painful.

How did you deal with the superficial aspects of the music industry when Garbage came out? 

SM: It was challenging, but on the other hand, it was really exciting. The first record has very little drawback. You’re so distracted by the adventure that you’re not really aware of the sideshow. It’s only when you start going through your career and the shine… not wears off, but it becomes second to your growth as a human being.

And we were incredibly lucky. We had an incredibly blessed run. Nobody got ill, there were no tragedies, there were no accidents, it was like magic. The second record was like magic too, although the strings began to show. Our primary relationships began to suffer.

Then you start focusing in on your life. [You think], well, I haven’t had a proper relationship for years, I get panic attacks when I go into the supermarket because I haven’t been anywhere by myself for three years — stuff like that. Then you start to realize that people treat you differently because they’ve seen your face on magazines and seen you interviewed on TV. The awareness slowly seeps in over two to three records.

Butch, did you have a preference at the time between producing and playing in a band? How did you balance?

BV: I look at it as two different hats that I wear. When I’m producing the Foo Fighters or Green Day or the Pumpkins or whoever, I have to remember that it’s their music. It’s their vision. It’s my job to help them achieve that vision. In Garbage, the one thing that I found liberating is that I got to wear a lot of different hats. I could be a drummer, I could play guitar, keyboard, I could be a sound experimenter, I could be a songwriter, an arranger, a producer, a lyricist. I think that’s one of the things that’s kept the band fresh for us. Because we are able to enjoy multiple ways to find creativity. If I was just a drummer, I know for a fact I would’ve gotten bored with Garbage. Personally, I put drumming pretty low on my totem pole. I should practice more [laughs].

How do the four of you balance each other out over a period of 20 years? 

BV: It takes the three of us gentlemen to balance out Shirley [laughs]. Duke and Steve and I, we’re fairly pragmatic, and Shirley can be very emotional and very outspoken. I think it’s a good balance. Somehow we’re able to keep her calm at times. And she’s able to set a fire under our butts. She’s a very, very passionate person. It’s been a good chemistry between the four of us. We’re like a family, really. We still get along really well. Shirley lives about a five-minute drive from my house here in Los Angeles. I see her walking around the Silver Lake Reservoir. We get along because of the shared self-deprecation and humor that we have. We try not to take ourselves too seriously. We’re really nerds who like to make fun of each other, too. I think having a sense of humor about things has been really healthy for us, over the last 20 years.

MTV played a major part in your initial success. Since MTV doesn’t have the same influence over music consumption that it did 20 years back, is there anyone or anything an aspiring pop musician can turn to to achieve the same level of exposure today? 

SM: Here’s the tragedy of the modern record business: It’s radio. If you’re not on radio, nobody really is going to hear you or see you or care about you. It’s so complicated. The reason we are engulfed by pop acts is because pop acts are played on radio. Why are they played on radio? Because they’re the most popular. They attract the biggest audiences. Everybody’s trying to be the biggest, because if you’re not the biggest, you don’t survive.

We got played like crazy on MTV and on the radio, and therefore we had a successful record. The same goes for today. If you’re not being played like crazy, you will not have a successful record, in general. Record companies sign only what they think will get onto radio, and of course these are the songs that appeal to the masses. Sometimes we get lucky and we get artists like the Weeknd who make incredible pop music that’s dark and twisted and exciting, or we get ten-a-penny songs where you can’t tell who’s singing.

So how can a band sustain a long-term career?

SM: I really don’t know, it’s so difficult right now. Record companies aren’t even wanting to sign bands because it’s too expensive. The economics of the music industry is destroying the idea and the possibility of survival for bands, and that’s so sad.

BV: Music culture has changed so much. There’s a couple of different ways a younger artist can get their music out there. If you want to be a pop star like Taylor Swift or Katy Perry, you still need that big machine — the major label clout to saturate the airwaves, to spend money on advertising, to get on the best TV show. But if you’re an indie artist, you have all the tools at your fingertips to do it yourself, through social networking, digital distribution.

The only way to really make an impact is to write a great song. Because if it’s really good, people are gonna want to hear it more than once. They’re gonna come back, they’re gonna want to discover who the artist is that made it. I get a lot of young musicians coming to me asking, should we sign to a label or should we try to do it ourselves? I say, I think you have the power to do everything yourselves these days, but the most important thing is to write a song that’s going to connect with an audience on some sort of emotional level.

I’ve been hearing news about a sixth Garbage album. Is there anything you can share on that front?

BV: It’s about 90 percent done. Our engineer Billy Bush has a studio five minutes from my house on Glendale Boulevard, and that’s where we recorded most of Not Your Kind of People, and that’s where we recorded most of the new album too. There’s three or four songs that sound very much like classic Garbage, whatever that means — just the sensibility in how we play and record. Then there are seven or eight songs that are different sounding, but they still sound like us.  I’m sitting in my home studio here in Silver Lake staring at the console with one of the tracks we’re working on trying to finesse. I’m lab ratting out.

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“It’s a great thing, man,” Raekwon says of this week’s 20th anniversary of his classic solo debut, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, which SPIN recently lauded as one of the 300 best albums of the last 30 years. “It’s a piece of my legacy that’s well respected and protected by the culture, so just to be able to go out there, reminisce, play a couple of tunes, pop a joint, and say thank you.”

The 1995 album helped reinvent gangsta rap as we know it, trading in N.W.A’s anarchic vision of the streets for a more complex painting of organized crime, involving sampled film dialogue and an imagistic grandiloquence that honed in on brands like Cristal, which Rae (and the co-billed Ghostface Killah) helped popularize among rappers. Nas’ guest turn on the track “Verbal Intercourse” rerouted the first half of his career entirely onto a path more R-rated than Illmatic’s wisdom from the asphalt. And if it’s possible to imagine, Biggie was accused of ripping Cuban Linx off. In honor of the album’s 20th year as a hip-hop benchmark, SPIN hopped on the phone with Raekwon to ask him 20 questions about the .

More from Spin:

• Wu-Tang Clan Wind Down ‘Final’ Tour With Guest Stars
• Nas, Wu-Tang Members Releasing New Albums With Mass Appeal
• Wu-Tang Clan Assembling Once More For Final Tour

Is there anything people still don’t know about Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…?
When we talk about Cuban Linx, it’s more about the bond. To try to tell people [we] can’t break. That was the mindset. Everybody has a link in their family that may be a loose link. It’s all about keeping it strong. So this album is just defiant brothers trying to make it out of the hood, staying strong, and trying to make it, to talk about the truth and the pain that we were dealing with at that time that we were trying to escape.

What made you guys decide to try recording it first in Barbados?
Just to get away, to let the mind be free and escape all the turbulence of life and go somewhere tranquil, where you could just get a peace of mind and feel like you’re by yourself, and just really meditate. You’ve got to have a clear mind and that’s what we wanted to do making this album. We watched some of our greatest heroes of music do it. Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On, he did that on the mountainside. So me and Ghost were really on that page, said, “Yo, let’s get away, get focused and make something great.”

But instead you guys experienced a lot of racism over there?
Yeah, the hospitality wasn’t good. We felt like, you know what, we don’t feel welcome in this particular hotel. But Miami was a great spot to be at. It was quiet for us and it gave us the opportunity to really just talk to the beach.

So do you consider it more of a summer album than a winter one?
It’s universal. That’s a good question! But no, I don’t consider it a summer album. You can listen to this album if it’s raining and it does something to you. We do have some albums that cater to seasons, but Cuban Linx has [both] that warm and cold feeling. I’m glad you said that, because that’s how I do look at making albums. I make albums to attack the same climate.

Was it really the first album to name-drop Cristal?
You know, I didn’t really know anyone who was bragging about champagne back then that was making albums. We were so young at it still, and we accidentally ran across Cristal because we was asking for Dom Perignon or something and they didn’t actually have Dom Perignon. We were like, “What’s the next best s—t you got?” And he was like, “But we got Cristal,” so we were like, “Yeah, bring it in.” He put the bottle at the end of the table and we were sniffing around, looked at it, sized it up. Pretty nice bottle, with gold wrapper, gold top, looking like Dom Perignon, so we popped the bottle and drank it, and it tasted nice. It matched our outfits, it matched our tastes where we was at. So they didn’t have what we wanted so they came out with that, and after we drunk it it was like yeah, that’s some s—t. We start putting it in part with our speeches, whatever we’re talking about. Like, “Yo, we need that Cristal right there.” But it wasn’t like we was watching the wine list every five seconds.

Did you guys script the album’s skits or were they improvised?
A lot of it was improvised, because what we do is that we look at the lines as characters and we act, so certain things we know we had to put in place to make you go into our world and understand what we’re doing. Sometimes you could be hearing it like, “Well what are y’all talking about?” So we wanted to bring these pictures ahead of time, and a lot of it was just done naturally, like skits. Back then you might have had maybe 20 percent of artists who were interested in doing something like that, but we wanted ours just to be all real life.

You sampled The Killer and Scarface on the album, why not The Godfather?
It’s hard to get certain things. It could have changed the whole vibe of the album; people out there, they love us and they know that we were just painting a picture, trying to make something that was authentic.

[The Killer director] John Woo was one of those people, right?
John is a great guy.

What was it like hanging out with him after you sampled his flicks on the album?
We had the opportunity to write him a letter and just send our love and say, “Wow, you don’t even know how much you as a dope director means to us, that you make such visual movies.” That’s why we when we’re making our music, it turns into a movie. If there was somebody we had to look up to, it would be that kind of person. It was just all about acknowledgement and love and respect. I remember seeing The Killer. The Killer’s an old movie, but after that, Hollywood started to make more karate-style movies. More Jet Li movies. It’s like, wow, people’s paying attention. And that’s a great thing; all this stuff right here is just part of our world, so that’s why we wanted to get it on the album.

What do you remember about the flood in RZA’s basement that destroyed beats intended for several different Wu projects?
It wasn’t like “Damn!” but it was like, “Wow, we had some good s—t in there.” It wasn’t like it was 200 hundred songs that I felt that was missing, but there were some hot ones we know that was still on the stove that got buried that had potential to be great records. When the basement thing happened, it taught us all a lesson: have your music on a backup, have a double of it. S—t might get electrocuted, the house might burn down, or whatever, anything. Now we know how important it is to keep every little thing. That’s why any time we’re in the studio with an artist, everything is for a reason. You might miss something. Something might have felt good right now, but why didn’t it feel good then? So it’s always good to hold onto your archive.

Which version of “Can’t It All Be So Simple” do you prefer, the 36 Chambers original or your own remix?
I always loved the remix because the remix kind of made it a little bit more adventurous. That record is more like a cousin of the [original], because we’re describing certain things and where we want to be at in life, saying we have gold records and all of that before we actually had it, and we want to live this way. You see kids getting hurt and crime and the only thing is it ain’t simple to be what you want to be.

Was it a big decision to let Nas onto the album as the first Wu-Tang guest who wasn’t in the Clan?
It was a friendship that was built and I loved him as an artist. I’d seen the future of what kind of great artist he is. You know, he was my friend. He’s still my friend today. We still laugh and reminisce. At that time, we didn’t really want to do features on our albums, because we already had our own vision of who were. But in that case, we, knowing that this is my record, and I do know that we don’t do that, but this one, we have to do that because we all feel the same way, love and respect for this man to be on the album. And it was a great decision. One thing led to another and the next thing we know we’re in the studio, and he’s pulling rhymes.

Was there any hesitation about doing a more commercial song like “Ice Cream?”
Believe it or not, “Ice Cream” might have been one of the records that I didn’t have a lot of confidence in. And the team would be like, “Hell, you crazy.” I’m like, you know, this album is more like cocaine, this is a drug dealer’s album. There’s a real storyline, no time for play. But it made sense because we know at the end of the day we love the female audience. We had a female fanbase so we knew how important it was to make a record for the females, so we was like “Alright, f—k it,” so we’ll just put one up there. Because we want to keep to the concept. The record fit, it was dope, it was a different song, it resonated. So “Ice Cream” grew on me. It grew on everybody. The video just solidified what it was about, seeing all different flavors of women. And we take that all around the world now. They ask us all over, “What flavor am I?” They might not even speak English but they still know that they’re flavors. So it’s kind of dope. It just happened.

On “Glaciers of Ice” you call yourself the rap Meyer Lansky. Did you know he was only five feet tall?
Yeah, when you go back to yesterday, Meyer Lansky was a great thing. He lived for a long time and he died a peaceful death, so I respect his integrity for who he was.

Did you initially raise an eyebrow when Jay Z and other rappers adapted the album’s themes for Reasonable Doubt and other mafioso rap albums?
We loved it. It was borough talk, different boroughs speaking about their life and we all had the same stories. So I looked at that like, “Wow, he got a story to tell, and he got a story to tell.” Everybody would just describe their pain and their glory all in one, like a war report. A specific kind of hip-hop that I loved, because I could relate. I want the s—t that kids ain’t supposed to listen to. I want to study this s—t. It becomes the fight, it becomes competition, but it also becomes part of that underworld of hardcore lyrics, street s—t. We like to party, we get into that, but we tell tales.

Was U-God absent from Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…Pt. 2 because he got killed off in the first one, or was that not intentional?
When we was making the [second] album, we wanted to get everybody on the album. That’s my family. Of course, I would always want them to be on any album.

When did you first realize you wanted to do the sequel?
I was forced into the sequel. The fans were just like, “We want it, we want it, we want it.” And I waited years like, I don’t really try sequels like that. I’m not into that. If I made that album at that specific time, that’s what it was and I’m onto another entree. They just loved that food, they wanted that food, to where it started to become an agenda, like “Yo, gotta do it.” It was the request that really brought me in. I talked to some great firends and they was like, “It’s time.” And I was like, “Yeah, you’re right.” I was running from it, because I’m a chef, man, they call me a chef for a reason. I live that name naturally because that’s how I am. I’m always thinking of something new — clothes, fashion, this, that. People don’t know I’m like that. They just know I like cars — they don’t know I like designing s—t.

Was the Biggie beef on “Shark Niggas (Biters)” ever discussed with Meth who appeared on Big’s Ready to Die?
We always loved each other, man. We always had a relationship. But [Meth] never spoke on anything, and I never spoke on anything because that music is dope, and it was never a hatred thing. A lot of people, they get this [idea], but no. You want to go to Burger King, you’ve gotta go to 34th street. You want to go here, you have to go to 22nd street. And we were competitive and it just went somewhere else. But that never affected the music, though. The love was there. We played shows together, we went around the world together, we smoked weed together. I haven’t had the opportunity [to call Biggie] a great legend himself, but we all spoke highly, like, “That’s my brother.” He really was.

What song on Cuban Linx is your absolute favorite?
It might have to be the last one: “North Star.” It’s just the sound. It sounds like I’m going back into my life. If I was to make a movie of Cuban Linx, I would start with that track, because that track has a lot of pain and a lot of remembrance, those highs, those good days, those bad days, those dreary days, those struggle days. It was like the beat was making me vibe to it from another perspective, but the rhyme came out like a play in a movie: This nigga bust a shot and hit my man’s wife. You go in the club and your wife gets shot. There’s so much s—t going through your mind, because it’s like oh s—t. What do I do now? I don’t expect everybody to love it. I expect everyone to vibe to it, though. You don’t have to love that record, but just vibe to it. And that’s what it’s all about. That’s one of my favorite songs.

What other plans do you have for the anniversary?
We’ve got a dope CL95 Cuban Link beach jacket that’s coming out for the anniversary. People can take pre-orders now. It’s a dope jacket, it will have the purple hood; I could easily give you a t-shirt but to give you a working raincoat that you can wear, all-terrain, good quality and a little warmth in it, that makes me feel good to give that to y’all. It’s just a timepiece, though, that you can take and give to someone 20 years later and it’s still gonna look the same way it’s supposed to look. Like not much else on the shelves. And also we’re coming with an in-depth documentary, The Purple Tape Files, so we’ve got a lot of good things coming up.

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