Not Your Kind of People

In our 2013 interview with drummer Butch Vig, he explained the origin of the song: "I live in Los Angeles, and I was stuck in a typical LA traffic jam on the 10 Freeway, not moving, with six lanes of cars on either side of me. I just had this title, 'We are not your kind of people.' I felt like there was a certain feeling of alienation sitting amongst all these cars: no one's conversing and everybody's in their own world." He added: "we wrote the song in about 15 minutes. Just with a couple of acoustic guitars and Shirley singing. Again, it just came from having a title in that case. There was no music."

This slow waltz is the title track of the fifth Garbage studio album, Not Your Kind Of People, which marked the return of the band after a six-year break. Lead singer Shirley Manson told LA radio station KROQ that the band's hiatus made them work through why they wanted to make music. "You know, when we came off the road, we were up against a lot of hostility because the whole music landscape had changed in a way from when we first came out," she said. "And we just didn't fit in anywhere. I think we went away for a long time to really rethink everything and think about why we wanted to make music, if we wanted to make music, that kind of thing." "Everybody came back really committed and really wanting to make a great record for ourselves," continued Manson. "We just decided 'f--k everybody and who cares what anybody thinks. Let's make this record. We've got nothing to lose. If people love it or hate it, it's sort of a moot point, let's just make the record.'"

The daughters of both guitarist Steve Marker and drummer Butch Vig laid down vocals on this track, in which vocalist Shirley Manson sings of her refusal to conform to modern life.