"When I Grow Up" is a 1998 song written, recorded and produced by alternative rock band Garbage. The song was released as the fourth international single to be taken from the band's multi-platinum second album Version 2.0 over the course of the following year. "When I Grow Up" was the first split-single release in Europe for Garbage, in some countries, "The Trick Is to Keep Breathing" was released in its place. "When I Grow Up" proved to be a charting hit in both United Kingdom and Spain, before going on to become Garbage's most successful single release in Australia and New Zealand at that point in their career. In North America, "When I Grow Up" served as one of two singles (along with Sheryl Crow's cover version of "Sweet Child o' Mine") released from the soundtrack of the Adam Sandler comedy film Big Daddy. Composition "When I Grow Up" was written and recorded at Smart Studios during the 1997 sessions for Version 2.0. For the intro, the band routed a Nord synthesizer through a guitar pedal and distorted the sound in a 48-track ProTools set up. Drummer Butch Vig used three different snare drums, each hit consecutively and each processed (one through a flanger, one pitch shifted down and one gated), and made into a loop and matched with the Nord for that opening sequence. The scratchy vinyl record sound came from a Victrola gramophone that belonged to engineer Billy Bush's grandfather. The percolating keyboard parts were created by programming some sounds on a Planet Phatt synth module and running them through a guitar amp, complemented by a harmonic guitar note with a filter pulse applied. All of Shirley's vocal, drum and bass parts (performed by the band's touring bassist Daniel Shulman) were recorded to analogue "to get tape compression", while loops and sound effects were left in ProTools. A MicroLynx deck synchronizer was used to marry the analogue tape and digital audio workstation outputs, while the final mix was printed utilizing two Studer 2" tape machines. Guitarist Steve Marker credited Garbage front-woman Shirley Manson for coming up with a lot of the "sunny-pop" melodies on the song, explaining "that's something that we've always tried to do - have a dark lyric disguised by a happy pop melody. We like that sort of contradiction and juxtaposition." Lyrically, Manson described "When I Grow Up" as being about "that delirious state of