Sometimes nine minutes—seemingly perfect or otherwise—just aren’t enough to extract everything we want to know about an artist. But it’s not always the fault of our interviewing techniques. Sometimes our subjects just don’t want to gossip. Take Shirley Manson, who, even after 30 years as the fearless, beguiling, and, yes, even a little scary frontwoman of Garbage, holds her witchy outsider mysteries close under her tartans. She teases only fragments, flashes, a glimpse of the private cosmos beneath the eyeliner. That’s not to say she’s stingy with information: It’s that she just never shares everything. Is it because she understands drama—how with-holding makes the story land harder? Like last Oct. 9, when she shared a photo of herself, sans clothes, wearing only a sheet. It might have been provocative if she wasn’t in a hospital bed and hooked up to a couple of machines, announcing that she had just undergone major surgery. “I am currently at home, slowly learning how to walk again, shuffling around with a walker in my rehab pyjamas,” she posted on Garbage’s official Instagram page.