Compiling Absolute Garbage
The band's drummer, Butch Vig felt that Absolute Garbage would be "a full stop on part of our career", marking the group's movement to a new part of their development, rather than simply a contractual obligation, while guitarist Duke Erikson stated that "putting out a collection of our singles would be a good way to stay busy without working so hard". When Garbage began to collate the material for Absolute Garbage, it transpired that the analog masters of their debut album had been lost. Neither of the band's record labels had them, and after further searching, the band established that none of the mastering facilities they had used had stored them either. Vig and audio engineer Billy Bush were able to track down an archived, but rather incomplete and damaged, set of 16bit 44.1kHz safety DAT mixes. Despite the backups being far from an optimal situation, mastering engineer Emily Lazar at The Lodge in New York City was able to reverse engineer the missing songs from the damaged archive. Lazar used some alternate versions of the songs when completing the final master. Her assistant, Joe LaPorta, mastered and edited the remixes for the special edition.
Eschewing the Midwestern location of their Wisconsin-based Smart Studios, Garbage chose to record new material for the album in GrungeIsDead, Vig's California-located home recording studio. The band members had been sharing ideas over the internet prior to the sessions, and were keen to record them; vocalist Shirley Manson had came up with the song title "Tell Me Where it Hurts" a few years previously, and had matched newly written lyrics with a Burt Bacharach-style string arrangement that the band had created via email correspondence. After producing an electric guitar heavy version of "Tell Me Where It Hurts", Garbage recorded a second mix of the track with more emphasis on the strings and recruited their former touring bassist, Daniel Shulman, to perform bass guitar on the song. The band completed another three songs during the sessions, including "Betcha" (Vig: "it's fuzzed up"), "Girls Talk Shit" ("pretty cool sounding, lots of fast pizzicato guitars and cellos"), and "All the Good In This Life", which Vig described as "kinda Pink Floyd-y".
Vig had created a new version of their song "Bad Boyfriend", which had opened their Bleed Like Me album, when he had been updating his home studio the previous year. Keeping to the Garbage formula of incorporating non-musical sounds in their work, Vig used a digital recorder to capture the sound of his baby daughter's swing in motion as a percussive loop. Thinking that the compilation would benefit from the inclusion of a new remix, Vig presented his rework to Manson and Erikson who had been unaware of the new version. Both agreed that "Bad Boyfriend" should be included, but rather than solicit an outside producer, Vig spent a few days finishing the mix. Inversely, Garbage recruited production team Jeremy Wheatley and Brio Tellefario to create a new version of Bleed Like Me track "It's All Over But the Crying"; the band hoped the song would be a possible second single. A rock version of Version 2.0's "Push It" was completed by producer Chris Sheldon.
The group argued over the albums running order, eventually dropping a few of their singles, including "Androgyny" (from Beautiful Garbage) after Manson objected to its inclusion, before finalizing on the eighteen tracks that the group believed represented their best work. Vig oversaw the liner notes and thanks list for the album: "It's been a burden because we're encompassing what we've done over the last 10 years in one short paragraph;" music journalist Peter Murphy composed a biography on the band's history for the booklet, while the album artwork was designed by Tom Hingston Studio - a foil blocked silkscreen image photographed by David Hughes. The booklet also compiled a number of promotional photographs of the group taken over the course of their career by Stéphane Sednaoui, Ellen von Unwerth, Rankin, Pat Pope, Warwick Saint and Joseph Cultice.
The band compiled an hour-long documentary titled "Thanks For Your Uhh, Support" for the DVD format, featuring footage filmed backstage and behind-the-scenes, and archive live performances and interviews spanning the band's entire career. As well as interviews with the members of Garbage, the documentary also features Duke Erikson's daughter Roxy, Madison club owner and friend Jay Moran, engineer Billy Bush, former touring bassists Daniel Shulman and Eric Avery, Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins, White Stripes' Jack White and former MTV News anchor Kurt Loder. Region 0 pressings of the DVD contained all sixteen music videos to accompany the singles featured on the CD formats, with the exception of "#1 Crush", for which there was no clip filmed. Region 1 releases did not include the video for "Tell Me Where It Hurts".
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