You're listening to song exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, hereway.

This episode contains explicit language.

The band Garbage formed in 1994 when three guys from Madison, Wisconsin,

Buchvig, Steve Marker, and Duke Erickson met Scottish singer Shirley Manson.

20 years later, they've sold over 17 million records worldwide.

In this episode, we'll get a view inside their 2012 song Felt, from the album Not Your Kind of People.

Buchvig, who is also a legendary producer behind some of the most influential albums of all time,

like Never Mind by Nirvana, Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, Dirty by Sonic Youth,

and Countless Others, spoke to me from his home studio in Los Angeles.

I also interviewed Shirley Manson separately to get her insight on how the song was made.

Plus some thoughts from their longtime engineer and now co-producer Billy Bush.

This is Felt by Garbage on song exploder.

Hi, my name is Buchvig. I'm a music producer and I'm also the drummer in Garbage.

I play a lot of instruments but primarily drums. We're not just defined to one role.

We get to play a lot of different instruments and that's one of the things that's cool about being in the band.

The track is one of the simpler songs on the record. The song started with a very simple riff,

kind of a drone and E.

I came up with just the initial riff and it doesn't really have a chorus. It just sort of has

this turnaround that Duke and Steve came up with.

That is grungy sound. It's almost like a blues progression in a way because it just loops that

main riff and then it has the turnaround and it goes back in the main riff.

As I remember the initial guitar that was recorded was kind of a scratch guitar and we didn't

...