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Welcome to “Bill’s Corner”  (BC)– a weekly single question and answer with Billy Corgan. On this first installment I got a little greedy and asked 2 questions in one.  

Crestfallen.com: With the upcoming reissue of Gish & Siamese Dream due out Nov 15th, what has been the process of choosing which songs to put on the upcoming physical release, and about how many songs did you have to choose from?

Billy: We’ve basically gone through all that we had in the way of cassettes, DAT tapes, and old demos on anything from 4 track to 24 track, and tried to find the songs that when put together told a little ‘extra’ story to the one already told in the official release. For example. ‘Starla’ is a song that deserves to be on the extra disc, because it’s one of the best Gish era songs that’s not on the record. For the fan who says ‘well, I already have that one’, Kerry Brown is doing a fresh mix of it, from the original tapes, that will at least cast some new light or perspective on a mixed version which was done in one long, torrid night in order to make a deadline. The original mix will still appear ‘as is’ on the Pisces release, but with a new remaster from Bob Ludwig.

As far as quantity of materials, we released probably more b-sides than any band in history. So there are some thing unheard by the general public, but alas demos that have been circulated, etc. For that fan that says ‘well, I already have that bedroom demo of Luna’, this will be a freshly mixed copy that will also be available on a 96k/24bit format, and high res files, so you will be able to get the best possible version. In some cases we are finding elements not in the original rough mix, so there are little surprises here and there.

Then there are those forgotten about moments and demos and things which have never been bootlegged, and we have found some of those songs too. It’s a nice mix on the Gish and Siamese extra discs of these pieces, which like I said, will tell a little story from the band’s perspective of what we valued internally.

We also hope to release Gish and Siamese ‘making of’ session tapes, plus every single mix on both albums, so you’ll be able to get all 7 mixes of Soma for example. Each mix is just a little bit different, to where if you listen to all the making of tapes and the varied mixes themselves they do let you peer deeper into our record making process. I know for me, it was coming across a lot of things I’d forgotten about along the way. Even something funny like us playing the riff for ‘bullet with butterfly wings’ while Butch was getting sounds for the Siamese Dream album. It only lasts a minute, but there it is in between us playing Geek and Sweet Home Alabama.