Interview with Butch Vig
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Butch Vig
American record producer and drummer. He produced Nirvana's Nevermind and the Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and is a founding member of the band Garbage.
Source: Pensado's Place on YouTube
These answers are taken from Producer Butch Vig - Pensado's Place #197 on Pensado's Place's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with making music?
I grew up in a music household. My mom was a music teacher, so I was exposed to tons of pop music. I never felt elitist about music. She'd play the Tijuana Brass and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She was buying Rolling Stones singles, and Perry Como, and Camelot and West Side Story. Every night she'd put on a musical and we'd hear it while we were having dinner. So music was there all the time.
The radio station in the town I grew up in, Viroqua, was country western. So I'd hear country western music from 8 in the morning till 11:00, then they had polka music, then the farm news. Then they had a thing called Mail Train from four to five where they played the top 40. And of course that's what I wanted to listen to every day. That's part of my upbringing: I was exposed to so many kinds of music. I sort of feel like I'm a pop geek.
What drew you to a career as a musician?
When I went to the University of Wisconsin, I took four semesters of electronic music. There were no keyboards. It was all ARPs and Moogs, all patch cords. In order to make sound, you had to physically take a patch cord, turn on an oscillator and a filter and turn knobs, and crazy stuff came out. I kind of got obsessed with sound, not just melodies.
I literally had to make a choice. Was I going to come to Hollywood and try to get in the film industry, or should I stay in Wisconsin and record punk rock bands? I kind of felt like, well, it's kind of fun recording punk rock bands, so I'll do that.
Gary Klebe from the band Shoes was a studio gearhead. One day I was sitting in the studio asking all these questions, and he point blank said to me, 'Don't just be a drummer. I can tell you have all this stuff going on. You want to do more than that. You're at the board, you're trying to figure it out. You should do that.'
What do you enjoy most about making music?
I'm a total nerd geek. I'm a studio rat. I'm kind of an audio geek, but I like it. I'm still curious about recording and engineering.
In Garbage, I like to be a lab rat. I like to go in there and totally geek out and just go crazy, and I think part of that comes from those four semesters of electronic music, just making weird sounds. It's like a painting, especially in Garbage. We take a song and we throw paint on it. Some of it stays, some of it runs off, then we'll go, 'Oh, let's throw some more paint on it.' And what usually happens is we have to start taking stuff out. But that's part of the fun. The great thing about being your own artist is there is no one to tell you what to do.
How did your career as a musician unfold?
I was playing in a band in Madison called Spooner, a new wave power pop band. We were making our own records, but we didn't really know what we were doing. I was interested in the process, so I just started asking people. I never had any formal recording education. I didn't do the hierarchy system where you start as a runner.
With another band of mine, Firetown, we did a record on my eight-track, put it out and sold 60,000 records on our own label. Then we got signed to Atlantic and made the second record in New York for $400,000, and it went straight down the tubes. After four or five months in New York, I went back to Madison to make Killdozer's 12 Point Buck, and it was like, I am free. That's the record that Billy Corgan heard. That's the record Kurt Cobain heard. Maybe 5,000 people bought it, but a lot of bands bought it, and all of a sudden I started getting calls from other labels.
By the time I had success with Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, I had done probably 500 punk rock bands. Record everything in one day, mix it all in one day.
What advice do you have for new musicians?
I think learning as much as you can about every possible aspect is really, really important. Just learning how to play your instrument, or if you're not a musician, learning about the technology, about recording techniques. Obviously there are some genius musicians, engineers and producers who don't know anything. They just make it up on the fly, and they're so talented that they can do that. But I think it's really good to have as diverse knowledge about music, all aspects of it, as you can.
I encourage people to try everything. Experiment. Make a death metal Prince record. Go crazy, because you can. No one's going to hold you to it except yourself.
Think about a demanding producer, bandleader or collaborator. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
When Firetown got signed to Atlantic, we had this list of all these A-list producers. They all passed, and we were sort of forced to work with Michael Frondelli, who's a great engineer. And Michael was hard on us, man. Woo boy. That was a tough record. But he was a kick-ass engineer. He mixed Crowded House, Don't Dream It's Over. That was his specialty, I think. I absorbed every single thing he did. I learned everything I could from him.
The electronic music class I took was run by an avant-garde jazz saxophonist, Dan Harris. The first day I went into the studio, he played a two-minute composition, then he took his scissors and dropped it on the floor and said, 'I want you to make something cohesive out of this.' I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. He turned me into a damn good razor blade editor, and I realized right away how you can start manipulating sounds just by juxtaposing things and flipping them backwards.
How do you keep communication clear with the band and the people you record with?
When you start getting in the studio with a band or an artist, so much of it is psychological. I realized it's up to me to be sort of a spokesman for the band or the artist. It's my job to help them get their vision. It's not my vision. I want it to be their record. Sometimes you have to say, 'You guys are trying too hard. This doesn't sound like you.' And other times maybe they need to get into an uncomfortable spot and play something they're not ready to play, because something will come out of that.
Because I'm a drummer, I'll watch how everybody plays. Do they push the beat? Do they pull it back? How loud are they hitting things? And it's up to me and the engineer to adapt what we're doing to what they do. I have never fired a drummer in the studio. I would rather make them work harder and spend the time to make them better, because otherwise it's not going to sound like that band anymore.
Describe your style.
I like to saturate stuff. And I kind of see music in colors. When I'm listening to stuff, I sort of see grays, or brighter shiny things, or this murky, I can't even really describe it, but my brain kind of gets these colors going.
Rock and roll is the beat. A lot of people think it's about guitars, but it's really about the vibe, the groove. Music should speed up and slow down sometimes. Some of my favorite songs, Stones records or Beatles records, start at one tempo, and by the end it's a lot slower. It's okay if it speeds up. It's okay if a darker bridge pulls back.
When we made Version 2.0, we started nano editing, going in so deep. I think the songs are good, but the feel compared to our first record, which was on analog tape, was looser. Everyone has the tools to make everything perfect. If you make it perfect, it doesn't have any character.
Tell me about a record or a part that was hard to get right. What was it and why was it challenging?
Tons of kudos to Dave Grohl, because Sonic Highways was his idea. When he first told me, I went, 'You're crazy, man. That's going to be a big pain in the butt.' And it was a pain in the butt, but it was also really fun. From my point of view it was tricky, because Dave said, 'I want to write music, but I want to wait and write the lyrics the last day I'm in the studio, because I want to incorporate what I've experienced in each city.'
So we rehearsed for about four months, and all they did was play instrumentals. No singing, nothing. Someone would go, 'I've got a riff here,' and I'd play it back for Dave and go, 'Is this going to work? Is it going to jar with a melody? If you would just sing the melody, I would have an idea.' I didn't know anything until the last day of tracking. He did 75 to 100 interviews and pulled lines out to put into the songs. Then on Saturday night he'd come in about 8:00 and go, 'Here's the lyrics. Give me the mic.' He'd do like four takes and it would be done.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
We'd been in the studio with Garbage till 2:00, and I got a call at 7:00 a.m.: a backhoe ran through the studio door. I was barely awake, and I came down, and sure enough this gigantic thing, like a bulldozer on stilts with a giant catapult thing, ran through a light on East Wash, slammed through a door and powered through a brick wall right into our tracking room. It demolished the back of the drum room. If it had been at 10 o'clock at night and the drummer had been playing there, he would have been killed, man. That's what I remember about Rolling Stone: that photo of the backhoe punched through the wall.
Butch Vig's Full Biography
Butch Vig was born on 2 August 1957 in Viroqua, Wisconsin, USA. He is an actor and composer, known for Captain Marvel (2019), The World Is Not Enough (1999) and The Crow (1994). He has been married to Beth Harper since 2003. They have one child.