Songfacts®:

• Shoegazing is a type of alternative rock characterized by significant use of guitar effects, and indistinguishable vocal melodies that blend into the creative noise of the guitars. The sound emerged from the United Kingdom in the late 1980s and Butch Vig told MusicRadar.com how this track pays tribute to the genre. "'Felt' is our shoegazer song on the album," he said. "We're massive My Bloody Valentine and Jesus And Mary Chain fans, so this is a little nod to that British sound. I'm a pretty average guitar player - I'm not very good - and when I wrote the riff at home, the guitar was tuned weird. I don't even know what it was. I made a little 30-second mp3 and sent it to everybody, and Shirley (Manson) called me back: 'I love it! I've got some lyrics to it."
  
  "The next day, Duke (Erikson), Steve (Marker) and I had to quickly put a track together," he continued. "The drum and guitar parts are pretty simple, but they're dense - I think Duke and Steve layered about four or five tracks each. We definitely wanted to go for a British wall of sound feel - Phil Spector meets My Bloody Valentine."
• In our Butch Vig interview the Garbage drummer reflected on how the song demonstrates the band's improvisational methods: "When those guys go about doing the guitars, it's a bit of experimentation and trial and error. Whoever gets inspired first will pick up on something. Usually, they try to establish a core sound, something rhythmic, but they do like to come up with riffy things, weird things. They'll f--k around for hours, plugging in different pedals and trying stuff out. There were something like 40 guitar tracks recorded for the song, but in the final mix we kept eight or ten."
• Shirley Manson sings very softly on the song: "When we recorded her, she wanted a lot of reverb," recalled Vig. "'Mix me kind of low,' she said. 'I don't want to hear what I'm singing.' It's a real fuzzed-out dream state."