Billy Bush hints at possible Live album in the future.

In an online Interview with iZotope (from 2005 we think) Billy Bush hints there could be a possible Live album in the future. The interview with Billy Bush can be read below or at the iZotope website.

For the last decade, Billy Bush has blazed new trails as the engineer and technical guru for the band Garbage. A lifelong lover of records and a kindred spirit to Garbage drummer and producer Butch Vig, Bush talks with iZotope about the meticulous recording process that has produced the band’s adventurous and critically acclaimed albums.

What first drew you to engineering?

I’d always had a love for records and loved the way records sounded, especially on headphones. Anything that sounded amazing and blew my mind I loved. I’ve always had the kind of brain where if I hear something like that, I want to know how it’s done.

When I was playing in my own bands I’d always want to record them, so I started recording them with four tracks and got my feet wet doing that.

And then my life took a detour because my college debts got to the point where I couldn’t afford to go to school anymore. A friend of mine got a job playing guitar in a band and he said, “Why don’t you come out on tour, keep my guitars and amps in order, and you can be my guitar tech?”

And I said, “That sounds like a good way to see the world and pay off some debts. I’ll do that for a summer and go back to school.” Next thing you know, here I am.

How did you first get together with Garbage?

When they stared on their first tour in ’95, they needed to hire some crew and figure out how to do all of their stuff live because they had never played [live] before.

The band was completely an idea and they never had any intention of going out and doing any live shows. It was kind of a one-off sort of thing – “we’re going to make a cool record” and that was going to be it and everybody goes back to their regularly scheduled lives.

And when the first single “Vow” had taken off and they said, “well, how are we going to do this live?” That’s where they called me in.

And now Garbage is your full-time gig?

It’s funny – Garbage has been pretty much my full-time gig for the last ten years. And that’s how the relationship with me and Butch and the band came to the forefront.

They hired me about 10 years ago to help with the live programming and it evolved into me doing all the engineering on their records and B-sides and that sort of stuff – being overall the technical sort of geek for the band. That’s why I moved out here [to Madison, WI].

Other than that, I’ve worked with Butch extensively on other projects outside Garbage. I’ve done all his engineering for the last eight years on anything he’s done outside of the band except for a couple of things he did while we were out on tour.

So you tour with the band as well?

I do programming and the backline control as opposed to live sound.

There’s a funny thing about live shows – there’s no “undo” button.

Have you ever recorded the live shows? Can we expect a live Garbage album?

We’ve recorded a lot of the shows over the last three tours and they’re just kind of sitting in a vault waiting around for us to do something with them.

Do you find it more difficult to record live than you do in the studio?

They’re just completely different beasts.

Garbage is a strange thing, anyway. Most of the time when you make records, you’re just capturing what the band can do at that particular time.

But the way we use the studio, it’s more of an instrument in itself. The band writes constantly when they’re in the studio, even when they’re in the mixing process.

But the live stuff is really easy – you just kind of throw and go. You just try to catch that particular day’s magical moment and hopefully everything’s working and you’ve got everything. You can figure out how to make it sound cool later.

Is the band doing a lot of creative work on tour?

Occasionally we’ll have to do B-sides and that sort of stuff, but the band’s usually found it pretty difficult to be creative on the road, usually due to our travel schedule.

We do a lot of travel overseas, so it tends to be grueling. And it’s hard to get into the creative frame of mind when there’s a constant sense of upheaval.

What is a typical day in the studio with Garbage like?

Every day is pretty different. You never know if one of the days is going to be one of the painfully mundane ones where you’re spending all day just trying to get 4 notes to sound cool on a guitar, or if it’s one of those days where all of a sudden a song takes a wild left turn and everybody is wondering how the hell that happened.

That’s what makes being in the studio every day for a year or two palatable.

A year or two in the studio – that’s why we have to wait so long for each Garbage album!

Also, every time we put out a new record, our tours have been at least a year. We were out [on the road] for 24 months after Version 2.0. You put out a record, you tour for two years, then you spend a year making another record.

What are some of the tools that you’ve got in your arsenal?

It changes all the time. That’s one thing about being in the studio a lot – you need to change things just to keep the tedium at bay. We use anything and everything we can ever get our hands on. We’ve got a lot of relationships with manufacturers who call and say “hey, I’ve got a new pre-amp – you’ve got to check it out. Let me send you one of the prototypes.”

It’s always great when we get a chance to check out new stuff whether it’s plug-ins or whether it’s hardware or different guitars or amps or microphones. We just love changing things and trying different things. We try to keep from getting set in our ways in how anything is done. We try to make sure there are no rules and try to experiment as much as possible.

Do you prefer to work with analogue or digital equipment?

We use anything and everything. Whatever sounds cool we’ll use, whether it’s old or whether it’s new. We’re not purists in any way, shape or form.

Do you work exclusively in Pro Tools? Do you use other programs or equipment to do mixing and mastering?

It depends on the direction the song is going. Some songs want a more old-school analogue approach, and sometimes we want a really cutting- edge approach.

We change depending on what needs to get done. It really keeps you on your toes and forces you to continually learn – not only all the new software or pieces of gear that come out, but also learn about how things were done back in the past. Like how did all the Motown records get that drum sound?

How did you come across Trash?

My search for something like Trash came from us trying to get a vocal distortion sound that we really liked. We’ve always had a problem trying to get a distorted vocal that sounds aggressive but that is clear and where you can understand the enunciation of the words.

And how was Trash useful in that respect? Was it just that there were a lot of options?

When it comes to things like distortion and overdrive, I like things that are really tweakable.

Most things have a certain specific distortion sound. You can control the EQ before the fact or the EQ after the fact, but you can’t really control the type of distortion.

Trash allowed us to fine-tune every aspect of the effect itself so we could carve out exactly how we need to get it to distort – what frequencies and how we could get it to sit in the track. A combination between the distortion and the compression and the different amp and speaker models allowed a lot of creativity in that regard.

Here’s a question we asked Butch, but we’d like to put it to you too. On first listen, Bleed Like Me sounds like a straightforward guitar-driven album. But there are a lot of subtle touches there. Is there anything you’d like us to listen for?

It’s funny. Whenever we’ve gone in to make a record the band sits down and says “We’ve got to make a record that sounds like this.” And then we go and we hammer away and a year later we end up with a record that’s nothing at all like they thought…except for this record.

They said, “We need to make a record that’s what we’re about as a band. We’re a guitar-driven band – it needs to have the energy we have live, it needs that sort of power.”

We started making a real rock record, and we got kind of bored with it. So we said, “what can we do to make it a Garbage record?”

We kind of figured out how to make what sounded like a rock record but if you really paid attention to it you’d hear all these little things in there that aren’t obvious. And there are all kinds of easter eggs in there.

Can you give us an example?

In the song “Bad Boyfriend,” it kind of feels like the guitar riff’s the same all the way through. It sounds like one guitar but it’s not. There’s an incredible amount of detail in that record that I think people don’t really hear on a casual listen. You’ve got to put headphones on and look for all the subtle colors inside.

So that was a conscious choice on the part of the band?

Absolutely. The band’s always loved records where there are surprises and twists and turns and subtle things. That’s part of the beauty of what they do, trying different things and knowing full well that ninety-nine percent of the people out there aren’t ever going to notice it. They’re not going to care one way or the other, but there are some people out there, like us, who love that sort of thing.

Like the Radiohead records or the U2 records – you listen to them and there’s always something amazing in there doesn’t detract from the song being an amazing song. It’s just an extra little color. They could have been lazy and recorded the song really straightforward and it would have been great, but they put a little something extra in there.

There are so many bands that sound so similar. You wonder what they’re doing that’s different than the rest of the bands that are out there.

It sounds like you are a real collaborator with the band. How does that work? Is your background as a musician helpful?

That’s the great thing about my relationship with Butch and my relationship with the band – they’ve always been open to any sort of ideas. They’ve been very cool about me coming in and suggesting how something should sound or what kind of instrument we should use here.

I definitely come from a musical background and that’s how my brain works. I’ve had to learn what musicians are trying to say when they’re describing an idea. Sometimes they’re saying one thing and they mean something completely different.

Ninety percent of my job is translating what it is that they’re saying they want to accomplish into what they actually want to accomplish. Then I need to figure out what tools I need to accomplish it quickly and gracefully.

Just the word “engineer” makes it sound like it has to be a set sort of way – you’re following a certain set of rules in order to accomplish a certain design. And that’s a misnomer for what we do in music. There should be no rules and there shouldn’t be a set design.

You’ve been working with Garbage for a long time. What keeps you interested and involved?

The band to me is always infinitely interesting. Being this close to a band and being able to watch the band evolve and be creative is really rewarding.

I never wanted to get into this to just be banging out records because it paid the bills. I wanted to do it because it’s creative.

This band has graciously given me the freedom to be really creative in what I do in a way that a lot of situations wouldn’t. And they’re also great friends of mine.

Please note it has been known for some time that recordings from the Version 2.0 tour onwards have been recorded by the Road crew.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen to very many people and to be part of it is a really special and wonderful thing.

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We aren’t 100% sure when this interview was done, if you know can you please contact us and we will place it correctly in opur archives.

Thanks to JP for bringing this to our attention.