Eschewing the Midwestern location of their Wisconsin-based Smart Studios, Garbage chose to record new material for the album at GrungeIsDead, Vig's California-located home recording studio. The band members had been sharing ideas over the internet prior to the sessions, and were keen to record them; vocalist Shirley Manson had come up with the song title "Tell Me Where It Hurts" a few years previously, and had matched newly written lyrics with a Burt Bacharach-style string arrangement that the band had created via email correspondence. After producing an electric guitar-heavy version of "Tell Me Where It Hurts", Garbage recorded a second mix of the track with more emphasis on the strings and recruited their former touring bassist, Daniel Shulman, to perform bass guitar on the song. The band completed another three songs during the sessions, including "Betcha" (Vig: "it's fuzzed up"), "Girls Talk Shit" ("pretty cool sounding, lots of fast pizzicato guitars and cellos"), and "All the Good in This Life", which Vig described as "kinda Pink Floyd-y".