Development and Composition
"Vow" began in rough demo form in January, 1994, as band members Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker performed sessions in Marker's basement recording studio and Vig and Marker's own Smart Studios business in Madison, Wisconsin. After Marker saw Shirley Manson's group Angelfish on 120 Minutes, the band invited Manson to Smart Studios to sing on a couple of tracks. After a dreadful first audition, she returned to Angelfish, which folded shortly thereafter. Manson decided to test for Garbage again, and after the successful second audition, she began to work on the then-skeletal "Queer" and "Vow". While performing "Vow", Manson ad-libbed the lyrics "I can't use what I can't abuse" and "like Joan of Arc coming back for more". The song is written in the key of A minor, set in time signature of common time with a tempo of 126 beats per minute. It opens with Erikson playing a guitar through a noise gate "with a lot of echo on it", and has a chord progression is A–C-F in the verses, D-D-B♭-A-A-Em-D5-B♭-G in the bridge, and C-D-G-F in the chorus.
According to Vig, the inspiration for the song was a newspaper article about a woman who had gone back to get revenge on an abusive husband, "so we thought it would be cool to get a bit of retribution in there." Vig also said he noted violence could also come from psychological stand point by seeing the story of a sado-masochistic couple who could not keep away from each other. Lyrically, Manson claimed "'Vow' is about having feelings . You have to face your feelings of revenge and work out why you feel that way. It's about that conundrum when you're really angry but in reality you're in a pitiful state. Angry, twisted, but deep down, vulnerable." During promotion for the song, Garbage joked to journalists that "Vow" was about John and Lorena Bobbitt.
Garbage had not initially planned to release "Vow" as their first single, as a single at all, or even include it on their debut album. The band felt that "Vow" was not representative of the album's genre-hopping body of work, although they later came to appreciate the situation that led to the song becoming their debut. Manson declared that "now we can do whatever and people won't know what to expect", but if the band had instead settled for "of the more clubby tunes" as a single, "we would have been pigeonholed as a dance band and that's a hard tag to shake".
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