Medication

Madison, Wisconsin has similar weather to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson is from, but that's about all they have in common. The three other members of Garbage are from Madison and convinced Manson to relocate there and become their lead singer in 1994. "Medication" came out of one of her early experiences living there. "I'd gotten really sick when I arrived in Madison, and I was really frightened because I was all by myself in a foreign country and I had no idea about how the medical system works here," she explained. "I was feeling very isolated and very paranoid. I was terrified. I remember I was sitting in the studio waiting on some of the boys arriving, and I was freaked out so I wrote these words out really quickly in two minutes. When the boys came in I said, 'I've got a song and we have to record it now!' It's a reflection on past ills in a way."

Shirley Manson has a well documented history of anxiety, self-esteem issues and periods of self-injury, which lends a literalized double meaning to the line "it cuts me to the bone." The opening line, "I don't need an education" might directly refer to a particularly depressive time in her life when she was bullied at school. Manson particularly seems to be calling for an end to stigmatizing depressed people and those who use medication to treat it: "And still you call me co-dependent. Somehow you lay the blame on me."

"Medication" is part of the second Garbage album, Version 2.0. They used Pro Tools to record digitally, so they ended up looking at computer screens a lot. The album title envisions the band as a new version of software.