Along with waxing philosophic about music, spirituality, and songwriting, Corgan also offered thoughts on professional football.
Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins The Smashing Pumpkins founder Billy Corgan is a thinking person’s rock star.
He’s also somewhat of a renaissance man.
Corgan formed The Smashing Pumpkins in 1988. The Chicago alt-rockers released six albums before splitting in 2000. Corgan reformed the band in 2006 and helmed three successful discs, including “Oceania” earlier this year.
He took time out of his schedule to talk from his home in advance of the band’s upcoming show at the Mohegan Sun Arena on Sunday. Along with waxing philosophic about music, spirituality, and songwriting, Corghan also offered thoughts on the Chicago Bears.
Let’s talk about your new album, “Oceana.” You said you tried to forgo the idea of creating a hit single in favor of creating a bunch of songs that had equal weight. Talk a little about your approach.
In alternative music, back in the day, people wrote singles of course, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to be a great band that was attractive your culture, Which back in the¥’80s of course was still a very small and self-contained culture. In the¥’90s when all of those songs suddenly became mainstream, then all the fools came rushing in. Then over the next 15 to 20 years, people became conversant in the language of rage anti-alienation. (Laughs).
So what happens is that the language you developed, which you consider proprietary, is no longer your own. If you engage in it too willingly, you end up sounding like a ghostly copy of yourself and also probably end up sounding like a poor copy compared to people who are good at doing it in a more poppy way. You kind of end up and in no man’s land and you see this with people who don’t know how to move forward from their core sound. So for us it was about moving the core sound to a different location and then writing popular music from that location – we could locate it. (Laughs.)
Well, in listening to the album, that makes sense. The song “Violet Rays” seems to speak to what you were just describing.
Yeah, I think it was just trying to find a new language that was exciting and didn’t sound like a retread of the past or somebody else’s new version of the past. Because it’s particularly surprising to me – particularly in the alternative rock culture – that the language hasn’t really moved forward for a very long time. There are a lot of bands, even new bands, that still rummage around in old language. I just wanted to get to a new place where we could say, “OK, we can make music from this new location.” The goal is not to be anti-popular. The goal is to be musically viable in a way that will be a attractive and be fresh, without alienating why people like what I do. If we were just interested in sitting around writing singles, we wouldn’t even bother with the song like “Violet Rays” But if you try to come from the heart with an awareness of communicating, then you can come up with songs like that.
That leads me to ask how much does the new version of the band help lead to that new location you speak of?
I’ve always worked with the band to try to develop what I call an intrinsic personality for the band. The writing of the music, in a way, is very selfish. I write it from my own perspective So when I work with the band I tried to see what their interest in it is and what their reflections are. And that kind of broadens the depth of the music for me.
Since you brought up songwriting, what’s your approach to that?
It’s changed through the years. I’d say in the past few years it’s become something that where I put my mind to it and just work at it. Usually chords and melody come first. Lyrics for me are a completely different journey once I have the melody.
It’s interesting to call it a journey. Because I know you have a spiritual side. How does that inform your writing, if at all?
Well, from a foundational point of view, it’s informed my entire life to the extent that having have a lot of success and not having found any joy and it, I sought other answers. And I found answers in my spirituality that allowed me to come back to music with a new heart. As far as how it informs the lyrics, it’s kind of funny, because I look back and look at lyrics from the early¥’90s even and they seem pretty spiritual to me. I’ve always been seeking, but to me spirituality is more about the journey than the destination. It’s more staying engaged in the journey about why we are here and what is the point of all this. I’ve always tried to write lyrics from wherever my confusion lay. (Laughs.)
You’ve been playing music professionally for over two decades now. As anything surprised you? And what has surprised you the most?
What surprised me the most is how you get kind of pigeonholed In in an overly simplistic way. And then you’re asked to either play to your type, or if you play against your type, you’re somehow supposedly being “difficult.”
It’s like people put things on you that you didn’t create. But because they created them, you’re supposed to live with that. And so what’s interesting particularly with my generation, is that I see other artists just going along with the flow. But when I don’t go along, I’m being treated like my difficulty at 20 was a good thing but my difficulty at 45 is a bad thing. (Laughs.)
I know you’re a big football fan. What do you think of how well the Chicago Bears are doing this year?
I think the nicest thing that I’ve seen, and I probably pay more attention to this than most, is that I see that the fan base is finally beginning to realize what a great quarterback Jay Cutler is. The first few years they were kind of overly critical, and I kept thinking, “Hey, we haven’t had a top 10 quarterback my entire life.”
And now we have a guy with a really good skill set and he still a fairly young guy, So let the guy figure it out. (John) Elway didn’t win Super Bowls till near the end of his career. It’s just funny how quickly people were willing to condemn Cutler.
If we just had a star at the slot receiver position or at tight end, I think we be better off. If we had a Victor Cruz or Wes Welker. I think right now that’s our Achilles’ heel.