The San Francisco Weekly had a phone interview with Billy Corgan recently where he told them “A good artist is willing to die many times over. What’s funny is, I’ve died so many times.”
Billy talked about how he and Jimmy chose to bring back Smashing Pumpkins. He is quoted to say ”When I made the decision with (drummer) Jimmy (Chamberlin) to bring the band back, it wasn’t too dissimilar from when you think, ‘I’m going to get back together with somebody,’” he says. “But it wasn’t that easy to return to a place where I even understood what it was about being in the Smashing Pumpkins that I liked.”
Billy then goes on to point out the band with just him as unfairly referred his new band mates as a ’rent-a-band’. Billy explains ”These are people with indie musical backgrounds. They’re not L.A. giggers with full-sleeve tattoos.”
Billy credits that working with Nicole, Jeff and Mike has allowed him to find harmony again and it translates to the music.
As for the old band line-up of the 90′s: ”There’s no way to properly convey what it was like to be in that band,” Corgan says. “And the fucked up stuff is 10 times more fucked up than what the world knows. I was in love with the Smashing Pumpkins,” he says, “I really believed in what we were doing. But I idealized the band — which overlooked their incredibly flawed human personas, and which now bites me in the ass, as they rear their heads for lawsuits.”
At the end of the interview he speaks of personal reflection: ”It’s been a long, weird journey,” Corgan says. “If somebody would have told me 15 years ago that at 45 I’d be living in a big house with two dogs and two cats, with no wife and no girlfriend, I wouldn’t have believed them. My life did not turn out the way I’d planned it. Not even close.”
