Eat Me, Drink Me (Stylized in all caps.) is the sixth studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released on June 5, 2007, by Interscope Records. It was recorded in a rented home studio in Hollywood by lead vocalist Marilyn Manson and guitarist and bassist Tim Sköld, and was produced by Manson and Sköld. It was the band's first album not to be recorded as a five-piece, as John 5 departed from the group in 2004. Instead of replacing 5, Tim Sköld remained with bass and played the guitar, and the band continued as a four-piece. Manson has stated that he sang most of the album lying down on the studio floor with his hands cupping the studio microphone, resulting in a very distinctive vocal sound. Of Sköld's compositions, a further two are said to have been turned into fully-fledged songs with lyrics, music and vocals completed but were not put onto album for fear of making it overwrought.
Upon its release, Eat Me, Drink Me was met with positive reviews from critics, and debuted at number eight on the US Billboard 200. The album was the last to feature band member Tim Sköld, and spawned two singles ("Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)" and "Putting Holes in Happiness"). The band supported the album with the Rape of the World Tour.
Development and recording After spending time around the end of the Grotesk Burlesk Tour in severe depression and contemplating his permanent departure from the music industry, Manson had a change of heart and recorded a duet of "Don't You Want Me" with Shirley Manson. This was originally intended to support the forthcoming best-of release but was felt by both artists not to live up to their standards and has yet to see release.
Lest We Forget: The Best Of was released on September 28, 2004, and was referred to by the singer as his "farewell" album; however, he insisted that it would not be the final Marilyn Manson album. After the release of the single "Personal Jesus", the band made a number of promotional appearances. Lest We Forget was certified Gold in 2005. When promotion for Lest We Forget concluded, the band returned to the studio and recorded eight embryonic songs—some of which had vocals, and one notably a tribute to Andy Warhol. It was supported by the Against All Gods Tour. The tour was marked by one release, a 2005 EP of "The Nobodies" featuring a new mix of the song (by Chris Vrenna) and other remixes.
Manson began his recording sessions on the album in November 2005 but was focused on his film Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, the process of opening an art gallery and personal troubles relating to his marriage. It was after opening the gallery, the Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art on Halloween night of 2006, that Manson really began his contribution as a singer by working out melodies and structures around Sköld's already existing compositions, writing lyrics quickly and usually recording on the same day. One result of this is that the album features six guitar solos from Sköld (comprising 3 minutes, 39 seconds of the album in total) and many other guitar moments while bass and keyboards—both played also by Sköld—feature much less than on a usual Marilyn Manson release. Manson explained that "[he] was writing in the way you would write a diary" and as a result thinks that the record was written from a "more mature musical point of view."
It has been stated that there were originally around 20 embryonic songs, all written by Sköld, two of which (that did not make the album) Manson considered complete with lyrics and vocals. Manson stated that he had a difficult time cutting some of them, but felt he had to in order to prevent the album from being "diluted". On May 31, the entire album was uploaded for streaming on Marilyn Manson's Myspace page, five days prior to its American release.
Themes
"Manson probably needed something to shake up his music, which started to become comfortably predictable in the wake of his popular/creative peak of Mechanical Animals, but the stab at soul-baring on Eat Me might not have been the way to do it. But Manson is such a true believer in rock & roll mythos that he's wound up embracing the cliché of the post-divorce confessional album, peppering this album with songs about "broken relationships and new love". Personal songs are unusual for Manson, but that doesn't mean he's abandoned his tendency to write about grand concepts. The difference is that this time around, Manson himself is the grand concept which may give him a lyrical hook, but not a musical one. On a sonic level, this is a bit of "Manson-by-numbers", but it feels as if his usual murky menace has lifted, with the music sounding clearer, less affected, and obtuse, while still retaining much of its gothic romanticism and churning heaviness. If anything, Eat Me is a bit too transparent, as its clean arena rock production makes the album sound safe, a bit too close to Manson cabaret for comfort, especially when he's penning songs whose very titles feel like unwitting self-parodies such as "If I Was Your Vampire", "You and Me and the Devil Makes 3" and "They Said That Hell's Not Hot", or when he lazily spews out profanity as the chorus to "Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery."
The most prevalent literary influence of the album and Manson's state of being is that of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, one of the most notorious books of the Twentieth Century. The song "Heart-Shaped Glasses" is the most obvious nod to Lolita as, according to Manson, Evan Rachel Wood is also a huge fan of Nabokov and had deliberately worn heart-shaped sunglasses upon meeting for a tryst when their relationship became romantic.
Connections to the novel are much deeper than simply the inside joke between Manson and Wood of the obvious age difference and the heart-shaped sunglasses as associated with Lolita appear only in the promotional poster and cover of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the novel, not actually in the film itself or in Nabokov's novel.
According to Manson, vampirism is just one of the dark themes running through Eat Me, Drink Me. "If I had to do a record review, I'd say it's got a cannibal, consumption, obsessive, violent-sex, romance angle, but with an upbeat swing to it." Aside from the obvious Lewis Carroll and Jesus Christ references, Manson says the album's title was also inspired by the story of Armin Meiwes, who placed an ad online for a person consenting to be eaten.
The Vampire, whom Manson personified during "Eat Me, Drink Me", in one regard is an inversion of the mythology of Christ. Both entities rise from the dead but as Christ offers his body and blood for his disciples to feast upon in communion with him, the vampire as contrary to this, devours the flesh and blood of his victims in order to make them one with him.
Logos
In 2007, Eat Me, Drink Me brought with it, for the first time in nearly over ten years, a symbol Manson adopted to represent himself with that did not have an immediate and apparent deeper connotation to the occult, mock-fascism or an artistic movement. This logo, later dubbed the "heart-shaped spiral" in official online store item descriptions, was minimalistically a roughly drawn heart which spiraled at its center. Manson revealed that it was an homage to Wood for inspiring him with love and creative drive which was the impetus needed to create the album. He elaborated that as it was tattooed on his left inner wrist.
The Eat Me, Drink Me era's visuals, was inspired by the iconography of the 1935 Karl Freund film Mad Love. As can be seen within both the album artwork and repeated on the CD single for "Putting Holes in Happiness", we see a closeup of Manson's eye with a heart as the pupil signifying a romantic and newly inspired Manson with literal "hearts in his eyes". In very close relation to the film and artwork of Mad Love, which portrayed an insane and malformed monster of a man who is driven to create his mad abominations by the love of a woman, Manson's eyes can be seen to signify this theme likewise in reflecting how Evan inspired his resurgence of creativity needed to compose the album.
Though not particularly esoteric or heavy in symbolism, the primary Eat Me, Drink Me Marilyn Manson logo were two blood dripping fang-like M's to represent the initials of the band. Fairly self-explanatory in representation, and included here for the sake of being all-inclusive, the dripping red M's are nonetheless an iconic logo in themselves and work effectively in illustrating the many vampiric themes of the album.
Composition
The various lyric allusions of Eat Me, Drink Me and the imageries which are referenced by Manson, not visual in this case but in verse form. As Eat Me, Drink Me has been Manson's most personal album to date, the lyrics are full of self explorations of past themes which Manson has explored as well as many subtle allusions to the album's inspirations.
The album opens with "If I Was Your Vampire", an industrial-goth song. Quiet ringing guitars are offset by heavy drums, owing as much musically to the Sisters of Mercy as it does to Nine Inch Nails. And the lyrics are as much Bauhaus as Ministry with talk of "blood-stained sheets in the shape of your heart". Majestic would be another way to describe it, as drenched in irony-deprived passion, Manson intones "Beyond the pale/ Everything is black/ No turning back."
The lyrical auto-erotica that begins in the lead-off track ("Drive me off the mountain/ You'll burn, I'll eat your ashes/ Impossible wheels seducing our corpse") continues with the wailing "Just a Car Crash Away" and the stand-out "Are You the Rabbit?", which harkens back to the "glammy guitar feel" of Mechanical Animals. "Are You the Rabbit?" builds off of Manson's obsession with Lewis Carroll, while pulling fairy-tale like lyrics off in style with an all-around catchy song and hook.
In what can only be seen as a way to maintain a buzz with the generation behind, his very public attachment to Evan Rachel Wood is flaunted throughout the peripheral of this release, from his personal artwork to the song and video for the Lolita-inspired first single, "Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)". The song itself is a piece of militant drum cadence mixed with raw adolescent sexuality in both Manson's lyrics and delivery: "She'll never cover up what we did with her dress."
The blustery guitar of "You and Me and the Devil Makes 3" revels in the repetition of the title alongside the menacing delivery of "There's not a word for what I want to do to you", but it's hard to take any song too seriously when it contains a "Murdercute happyrape" lyrical chorus. Although somewhat lyrically stunted, "The Red Carpet Grave" is an interesting song on the album, "The Red Carpet Grave" is perhaps the most confessional track, with Manson repeating the line, "I can't turn my back on you, but you're walking away."
The new wave elements are present to a lesser extent on harder-rocking songs like "Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery". The latter song is one of several that touch on Manson's marriage and subsequent divorce from Dita von Teese, as Manson writes about his personal life in his music for the first time.
Rumors also circulated for some time that Marilyn Manson wrote the song "Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery" as an attack on the band My Chemical Romance, for his Eat Me, Drink Me release (which he later denied, saying that it was aimed at people in general seeking to imitate him). In another interview Manson stated, "I'm embarrassed to be me because these people are doing a really sad, pitiful, shallow version of what I've done".
Promotion