"Shut Your Mouth" is a 2001 alternative rock song by Garbage, written and recorded for their third studio album Beautiful Garbage. "Shut Your Mouth" was the album opener; it was also released as its fourth and final single.

Composition and recording

"Shut Your Mouth" was written and recorded at Garbage's own Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin during the year-long sessions that culminated in their third album Beautiful Garbage. "Shut Your Mouth" was one of the first songs Garbage completed; the genesis of the song came from the band setting up their instruments and playing music for three hours, while Manson spontaneously sang. "It came from Garbage attempting to do a funk jam," Butch Vig recalled, "and then Shirley went into the vocal booth and this Patti Smith-style stream-of-consciousness vocal came out". Vig later described "Shut Your Mouth" as "Sly & The Family Stone on quaaludes. Lyrically, Shirley Manson explained, "In a general sense, it's about keeping your own counsel. There are so many opinions out there and misinformation and everybody's got their own agenda". Butch Vig recorded a funk jam for the middle of the song on a Drum Workshop kit; he then cut and pasted random beats using Pro Tools editing software to create a jarring percussive effect. Vig used a thirty-year-old Roger Meyer limiter to saturate the drum sounds on "Shut Your Mouth" ("...to make them sound thrashy").

The majority of the recorded work on Beautiful Garbage was to analog tracked through a Trident A Range mixing console; then fed into Pro Tools for recording overdubs, editing and mixing.

Single release

On April 8, 2002, "Shut Your Mouth" was announced as the fourth single from Beautiful Garbage by Shirley Manson herself, during a Garbage concert broadcast live throughout Europe on MTV. The band had already pre-empted active single promotion by recording both "Shut Your Mouth" and a cover of Rolling Stones' 1971 single "Wild Horses" for Re:Covered, a new BBC Choice music show where contemporary artists performed their new single and an old classic. The show was scheduled to air in June, when Mushroom Records UK had planned to release "Shut Your Mouth" across Europe to coincide with Garbage's booked Glastonbury performance and European tour. After the failure of third album single, "Breaking Up the Girl", and despite promotional discs already having been distributed, Mushroom cancelled the UK's June release date of "Shut Your Mouth". PIAS then issued the single in other European territories from July 8. the band performed the single on August 27 at that year's Kerrang! Awards, This position was the highest reached by any of the four Beautiful Garbage singles on the UK Singles Chart. The following week, "Shut Your Mouth" dropped out of the Top 75; this was the first instance in the fifty-year history of the UK Singles Chart where a Top Twenty track did so.

FMR released "Shut Your Mouth" in Australia on September 2 in its original format configuration; "Shut Your Mouth" peaked at number 74 on the ARIA Singles Chart, spending three weeks within the top 100.

In October 2002, Garbage returned to perform a co-headlining tour of North America with No Doubt and The Distillers. Although Interscope chose not to service any further singles from Beautiful Garbage in the United States, Universal Music Canada sent promotional discs of "Shut Your Mouth" to alternative rock stations across the country. Vancouver radio station 99.3 The Fox had been playing "Shut Your Mouth" since the release of Beautiful Garbage a year earlier. Interscope, however, licensed "Shut Your Mouth" to the soundtrack of the PlayStation 2 racing game World Rally Championship.

"Shut Your Mouth" was retained in Garbage's live set for 2005's Bleed Like Me tour, 2012-13's Not Your Kind Of People World Tour and 2016's Strange Little Birds tour. Along with "Cherry Lips", it was one of the only two tracks from Beautiful Garbage to be performed on all three tours. In August 2005, Garbage teamed up with Canadian electroclash musician Peaches to perform at AmsterJAM, a mash-up rock festival held at Randall's Island, NY. "Shut Your Mouth" was performed by both artists mixed with Peaches' single "Shake Yer Dix".

Music videos

thumb|left|[[Garbage (band)|Garbage in the first version of the animated "Shut Your Mouth" video.]] Two music videos were completed for "Shut Your Mouth". The first was a stiff 2D/3D animated promo, directed by Henry Moore Selder across May/June 2002. Garbage approached Selder to direct the video after being impressed with his videos for The Hives ("Die, Alright!" and "Hate to Say I Told You So"). The video concept is Manson's plea to the press to stop meddling in her private life, interpreted by her featuring as a guest on a Letterman/Springer-style talk show. The square characters are meant to look 'anti-3D'; achieved by removing the smoothness and perfection in the software, to give a jerky and organic look. Hand-drawn images of the band were then mixed in.

Four people, including Selder, from production company RealA worked on the video for a month. After the video was first broadcast online, the video was re-edited to suit the band. Marker, particularly, did not like his animation. The second edit, where Marker was redesigned with a Terminator-style look, was broadcast across Europe from July 5. A remastered version of the Live Version of the "Shut Your Mouth" video was included on Garbage's 2007 greatest hits DVD Absolute Garbage,

Remixes

Mushroom commissioned multiple remixes of "Shut Your Mouth" for the UK single release: an nu-disco rework from Italian producers Francesco de Bellis & Mario Pierro, known as Jolly Music, and a rock-led arrangement by Jagz Kooner, formerly of The Sabres of Paradise were included on the CD single sets. A further remix produced by Ken Reay was included on a white label 12" release distributed for club play. Garbage's tour/session drummer Matt Walker also made his own "Shut Your Mouth" remix, which he uploaded to YouTube in 2013.

The CD format of Beautiful Garbage contained an enhanced element where users could remix four tracks from the album, of which "Shut Your Mouth" was one. Created in conjunction with Sonic Foundry, using a customized version of their drag-and-drop ACID Pro music sequencer software, the remixes utilized samples and loops cut from the track masters. The enhanced section could be accessed when the user was online; a simplified version of the software featuring only "Androgyny" loops was accessible when the user was offline.

Critical reception

"Shut Your Mouth" received a mostly positive reception from music critics upon the release of Beautiful Garbage. In a review for Q, Ian Griffiths wrote "Arch opener "Shut Your Mouth" is a bile-laden winner from the same school as "Stupid Girl" while in her review for Rock Sound, Victoria Durham commented on the tracks "bombastic sass". In Peter Murphy's album preview for Hot Press, he wrote, "In an album of hot colours and dark corners, "Shut Your Mouth" is designer dirty-in-your-ear funk with free-flowing lyrics and what sound like purloined AC/DC riffs."

Track listings

  • Australian CD maxi <small>FMR MUSH106CDS</small>
  • European CD maxi <small>Play It Again, Sam MUSH106CDM</small>
  1. "Shut Your Mouth" – 3:25
  2. "Happiness Pt. 2" – 5:57
  3. "Only Happy When it Rains" (live) – 4:15
  4. "Wild Horses" (live) – 4:53
  • UK CD1 <small>Mushroom MUSH106CDS</small>
  1. "Shut Your Mouth" – 3:25
  2. "Sex Never Goes Out of Fashion" – 3:54
  3. "Shut Your Mouth" (Jolly Music scary mix) – 5:22
  4. "Shut Your Mouth" (video) – 3:25
  • UK CD2 <small>Mushroom MUSH106CDSX</small>
  1. "Shut Your Mouth" – 3:25
  2. "April Tenth" – 4:25
  3. "Shut Your Mouth" (Jagz Kooner vocal mix) – 4:39
  4. "Shut Your Mouth" (live video) – 3:27
  • UK CD3 <small>Mushroom MUSH106CDSXXX</small>
  1. "Shut Your Mouth" – 3:25
  2. "I'm Really Into Techno" – 1:22
  3. "Wild Horses" (live) – 4:53

Charts

{|class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

|+Chart performance for "Shut Your Mouth"

!scope="col"|Chart (2002)

!scope="col"|Peak<br />position

|-

!scope="row"|Australia (ARIA)

|74

|-

!scope="row"|Europe (Eurochart Hot 100)

|84

|-

|-

|-

|}

Release history

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"

|+Release history and formats for "Shut Your Mouth"

!scope="col"| Territory

!scope="col"| Release date

!scope="col"| Record label

!scope="col"| Format

|-

!scope="row"|Germany

|June 24, 2002

|rowspan="2"|PIAS

|rowspan="3"|CD maxi

|-

!scope="row"|Europe

|July 8, 2002

|-

!scope="row"|Australia

|September 8, 2002

|FMR

|-

!scope="row"|United Kingdom

|September 23, 2002

|Mushroom Records UK

|3×CD single set

|-

!scope="row"|Canada

|October 2002

|Interscope/Universal Music Canada

|Airplay only