as the world seemingly falls apart and as children only look to music for 30 seconds at a time one man one band stand in the way smashing pumpkins return and feed the fans like nobody else on this planet right now it is a banquet my man a banquet of
music i can't thank you enough for this where have you been my whole life saying we are here billy corgan to talk about this remarkable new album and the journey you've been on to make it i'm really thrilled to dive into it it is called seer
um and i joked at the start about there being a lot of music and and i think the idea of creating something that has structure that allows us to lose ourself and music as a body of work is isn't the obvious place that artists go now
um and yet you find yourself going deep deep deep on this record what prompted you to put out a body of work that is is this kind of elaborate in this this wide what is the what is the thing in you that makes you go i'm going all in on this well i i've
been beating the drum for a few years that um the band if if the band has a future it's as a creative unit not as a touring greatest hits thing you know you reach this point in the music business where everyone kind of starts edging you
towards the wall because it's just a lot easier and i literally have to have these discussions where i try to tell people you don't understand the real energy in this band is in creativity if you can get that right you'll get
everything else you want on the other side of the wall including big tours you know like the melancholics you know you'll get it all you'll get it all but but this band works a particular way and you just have to let it happen and i found there
was a certain amount of resistance to that because of the amount of work um that was necessary um so yeah i just i just said well i'm not asking for permission i'm just gonna go ahead and do this um and the two the 20 songs was the end result of like
going super deep and just sort of trying to evolve what we were capable of doing in the 21st century and and understanding that part of that was not relying on familiar things like had to kind of crack the code and find a new language which i'd done
before so it's not like you didn't do it on a door machine and the only way i know how to do that is work for about a year on something like over and over again until i kind of figure something out that can only be figured out with repetition
and stupidity or something you know it just takes time i'm glad you said that because when i listen to this album it's there's so much of it that is actually overwhelming which is a great thing because i realize now i have this opportunity to go there
and i now have the time because you took the time to make it i have the time to to unpack it and work it all out um just going through the lyrics and we'll talk about words in a minute so important to this to this experience um
there's a there's a lot in there but i think the first thing that fans recognized when you returned was that you were once again dancing and moving in in a unique sonic landscape that it was like you know what this is this is the sound i hear
to go along with the feeling which goes along with the words and i i guess the question is what came first this time was it the was it the writing was it the feeling was it the listening and going you know what i love that synth like where did it begin for you to to
get there to the sonic space when you're young and you don't have anything to lose you make very simple binary choices riff a is more exciting than riff b okay when you've done something for 30 years like anybody else you assume that whatever comes out of
your mouth or whatever you play has a certain kind of you know unique quality because it's been proven by the marketplace like you're still there right but if you go back to your 20 year old self your 20 year old self doesn't care
about any of that your 20 year old cell phone goes riff a is more exciting than riff b so i would have a riffs here the single sear is a perfect example it was originally a guitar riff like a heavy and we started with the heavy guitar
riff and somewhere along the way we said well let's try it this other way to see if there's something there so got a big fat synth going down and we look to each other they go well that's more exciting that's your a and b that's it so then it
becomes a series of binary choices there isn't a there's a devil sitting on your shoulder going yeah but the smashing pumpkins fans you know they expect to hear that guitar now don't you forget you you gotta you you go back to the
primal space of binary choices if somebody's not a musician listen to this it's as simple as like if you've ever had feelings for two people you have to make a decision because it's unfair to the one person and and if you're really in love with
the other you got to kind of make a move well that's kind of what it's like you have to kind of go where your heart tells you to go and so on an album like this i just went where my heart told me to go you know there was nobody sort of
standing there saying you can't do that because and and by the way i like to point out for the naysayer crowd i have done a lot of rock music you and i have interviewed about some of the rock music i've done over the last seven years i don't remember any mountains moving
you know i don't i don't remember anything super magical happening yeah the albums were well received generally people liked them but nothing magical was happening at some point you know i'm a wizard i go wait i still got like lightning bolts in the
in the hands you know i can still do this but how did i do it before oh i just made binary choices i just made really simple binary choices a or b a or b and you do that over the course of a year and you kind of get used to it you know
you forget that you're supposed to hook up the fuzz pedal or whatever you just you just get into a groove of like oh this sounds good and then you do stuff like you invite people in for example uh my management team who i think you
know a little bit personally um you know one of them's mark wakefield who was was the original member of lincoln park i mean these are not and and you know my manager you know started with system of a down in the garage you know these are people who are
real music people i didn't let them hear the record until it was probably 90 done wow and i kept telling them look you're either going to love this thing or you're going to hate it like there's no thing binary choice there's i know there's going to be no
middle ground here and if you hate it too bad because it's too late they came in and you know they're excited okay play first song they turned around they looked at me they were like this it was shocking to them what they were
hearing you know what i mean the good version of shocking we spoke a couple of months ago and i was in a similar state you know and i think i made some kind of i don't know i slapped something together about the fact that it felt like um
you'd finally caught up to yourselves and that idea of shocking us as fans based on what you're capable of as a as a very linear rock and roll band that can take us off into space that shock is less shocking because you have continued
to shapeshift over time one of the things i think that really is interesting about this album and this is i'm going to nerd out and get all my nerdery out of the way so we can dive into the human thing in a minute but the synth the synth part of this
record right it's undeniably anchored down by these these really beautiful analog sounding synths and washes and pads you've somehow maintained the naivety of that let me qualify that why the 80s is such an important decade for pop music is
because every number one song was so weird and so strange and so discordant and all the things that fit together just weren't supposed to fit together and that's because people were learning how to use synths they were like well
that sounds cool i don't know what it's supposed to do with the live bass and the drums and my voice and all that so i just put it in there and next thing you know you got flock of seagulls and psychedelic furs and simple minds by the way
new gold dream is one of the weirdest sounding albums of all time and they were an arena band on that so it's like i hear elements of all that but not because you're cherry picking it because it's the naivety of analog since you've somehow
been able to recapture that does that make any sense at all yeah because i don't know what i'm doing i don't know what i'm doing but i didn't know what i was doing on the guitar either when because in my mind you you were born with a guitar
i appreciate that but but you know i was talking my partner the other day because you know the cure is her all-time favorite band um and and when i learned how to play guitar when i was 15 16 i i started playing in that style that people would kind of more identify as
the cure style but it was my style but i never heard the cure so the first time i heard the cure when i was 17 years old i was like oh this guy plays like me you know it was born of a sort of a primitive desire to play a certain way
well it's the same thing with me with any technology i don't i actually don't want to know what i'm doing you know i i've gone in there with beat makers and stuff and they they flange the conga and i it just doesn't work for me the musician
to me is like where's the excitement you know what i mean the greatest rock and roll bands really didn't know what they were doing you know and that's there's in essence the discovery becomes part of what intrigues the listener they hear you
stumbling into places you don't belong you know so that's it's that simple i really don't know what i'm doing i could afford to hire people who know what they're doing and i have at different times but you know uh i work with bond harris who
you know founding member of knights are ab he did a lot of the electronics on a door i mean bond is not a savant with technology but the guy understands a groove like nobody's business so he would bring that that understanding to like a primitive sort
of approach and he taught me that same primitive approach so you know it's as simple as this it's like does this sound better does this sound better okay good let's go you know keep moving yeah it's really good and when you listen to it in the context of this
record you know you have really anchored it into what is up some otherwise i'm very tight playing what's amazing is hearing someone like jimmy who i know when you let him out and he just like no one plays like him but he's so incredibly um
restrained is the wrong word focused on is the word i would i would use on this record focused on the on the structure on achieving his his role within the song whereas there's been times even in songs you've recorded not even played live let alone live
where he's just spiraled off and somehow you've just caught up to him you know and then this record it just feels like he's in a different space how did you kind of bring everybody into a place where they understood what their role was on this
record because it's in the musician's nature to express themselves freely jimmy's thing is always songs number one so jimmy's always like just kind of tell me what you're after and i'll try to give it to you and i think the greatest compliment i
could give jimmy is he's one of the supreme drummers in the world and he's totally fine with relegating his ability if it's better for the song um so it's as simple as that i mean he doesn't there's no weirdness at all it's uh
it's just kind of point me point me down the road you want to go down but but what's interesting is people listen to the record they start to hear this other layout of rhythmic subtlety that's in there you know i mean like their first reaction is
like wait where's all the strum and drank but then they listen to it they start to hear the personalities kind of in there so it's cool i think i think people understand it when they hear it what connects song one and song 20. and i i
because i'm obsessed with the idea especially when you give me 20 songs in a time where one song really just exists at a time the the the idea of track listing and the idea of a cadence of why and i just i just can't believe that you get to the end and you're like
well the last one i've left is 20. so that'll be 20. there has to be some flow to it i think we live in a disassociative world and i think in the 20 songs there's a greater representation of the disassociation we live in a world now where nothing
begins and nothing ends in a weird kind of way nobody dies i mean they're already talking elon musk in them they're already talking about neural implants and your personality can live after time and then there was the kardashian thing
where they brought the dad back with the hologram you can clone your dog right so we're kind of right on the edge of of of kind of living forever you know so so does an album really begin or end anymore does it you know is there really a
beginning and ending is it it it's a constant disassociative state i'm you know my partner i watch westworld i don't know if you've seen that that series oh yeah oh yeah i i'm not i i i don't want to put anybody down i'm not a big fan of
the what they've done to the show but there's a certain ambiance that they capture in the ship there's a certain ambiance in the show that they capture this sort of disassociative like basically the modern world they're rendering into is half virtual half
literal and then you get to the robotics end which is a whole nother thing of like how we'll interact with ai and robotics but this idea that modern life is this kind of weird is it real is it not real and it's hard and who do you ask to even tell you what
that is anymore right so i think the album in its own 20 song way sort of represents this level of disassociation i never would have sequenced an album like this 20 years ago because i would really have thought of it as like
there's a beginning there's a middle and there's an end to me this is just like it's like some sort of big informational soup and dive in any point you want come out the other side and and i'm the last person to tell you what your entry point isn't what you're
out is because i'm meeting 20 year olds who are super into siamese dream and then i'm meeting other 20 year olds who said i don't even know your 90s work i only listened to the stuff from the last few years do you ever pinch yourself do you ever
go hmm is this is this actually real am i am i really here well there's a lot of talk recently about are we living in a simulation and even with what's going on with the election it seems to be a continuance of that thought
um yeah i don't know i go back to the morrissey line you know god's got a sick sense of humor or something you know like i'm not i'm not really sure if if you woke up in a different state perhaps in more of a cerebral state and you're physical
and you're just detached yourself let's put a base in a matrix scenario would would you be at all shocked but you're talking to somebody who has dreams that are real i had a dream the other morning my i go through periods where i'll dream for
months at a time like i'm eating like in blocks of time and i have like two hour dreams almost every morning before i wake up and they're like full movies they're full scenarios and sometimes i visit the same places again with the same characters
and the other morning i was having a dream where i was completely convinced it was real everything was colorful tactile all the rules of gravity applied and i remember thinking in the middle of the dream wait this is a dream this isn't real
and there's a in the carlos castaneda's books if anybody's ever read them don juan tells uh the main character because no one ever knows if these books are fictional or real but he tells the main character if you're in a dream and you want to
control the dream look at your hands so i remember this in the dream cause i was like okay if this is a dream it's let me see if it's a dream so i'm gonna look at my hands and every time i would look at my hands they would phase
like they would glitch like in a video game and i put my hands back down and i look again and they would glitch and that's about the time i woke up how do you feel when you wake up from that well this is the thing what is the difference between having a dream
where things happen and i mean i've had dreams where i hug people and they feel physically real like i have the same sensation as if i walked up and hugged you so you tell me what's real i don't i don't i'm not the person to say
the one thing i do know from all my spiritual uh musings over the years is that the most important thing in life is to be as much into the moment as you can be that seems to be the thing that balances all concepts out like if you get super into the moment
you're in you can both accept that it's possibly a dream but you can also accept that you're you're fully in the body and you're having this reality to its to its utmost that seems to balance two ideas the disassociative nature which online culture
promulgates is no you don't have to be in the body you can just kind of be here in a kind of a virtual thing and nobody ever dies and you can you know you die in the video game you just hit the button you start over again the billy that i'm talking to now who
has worked out that honesty and transparency and trying to find a way through a conversation as a learning exercise as much as a sharing or promotional exercise at least that's why i'm getting out of every conversation i'm having
with you lately um is is just someone who's kind of cracked cracked how to do it right it's it's the same desire but you've worked out you're getting really good at it the billy who first came out in the early 90s i think you were trying
to do that still you were always honest but you were honest and this what you said before reminded me of that i'm gonna be remember reading articles with you in spin magazine you talk openly about well if it all goes pear-shaped i'll just i'll just kill
myself and it was almost glib and it was like humorous yellow but that became the headline and then it becomes like you're so successful but you talk about wanting to kill yourself they don't those things don't equally match up you
know what what's wrong with you should be happy you should be happy and then it becomes this thing right and that's kind of what i feel it ended up being for a while there was just like why are you complaining and it's just so
off like it's like it's not it's not a competition it's a life it's like what you go through is real right yeah but i do i do think that i had to learn a valuable thing in that um and and i i grew up you know lower middle class and and and you have to remember
that if you've been lucky as you and i have been lucky you always have to have one eye on the fact that 99 of people will never have the opportunities that we've had so if you don't kind of lead with hey man i'm the luckiest guy in the world
and i feel blessed to be here and then here's here's my sort of wrap the rap becomes a thing that almost makes people feel bad like it's it ends up almost insulting them and that's something i had to learn you know like in essence both things can be
true i can complain about my stupid rock star problems why at the same time respecting that somebody who grew up like i did or worse which is many people have a hard go and they may not have the same opportunities that i had and i have to
have a little bit of balance and appreciation self awareness basically you become a bit tone deaf you know what i mean yeah yeah you're in your three thousand dollar coat driving your 150 000 car and you're complaining about how
the how the record company dropped your record you know you could justify that by creating character and it was interesting watching your interview recently your conversation with my friend and yours dan p carter where you really were very sort of open
about um the character versus the human and like hey check it out it's more bowie than you think it's it's like i'm william patrick corgan but at the same time billy's always been to some degree a character throughout this music and i guess i was
too lost in it because of what it meant to me as a fan and what i got out of the music to see that but in a way i guess that protected you at the height of that right in some respects that allowed you to detach yourself from from all of that stuff we just
talked about yeah i i created i created a kind of a living avatar and like a method actor i would go so deeply into it that i would talk that way and think that way and then one day i would wake up and it would be over and i would move on to
another character it was certainly inspired by people like bowie or iggy pop or you know the guys in bauhaus or whatever i just kind of took liberally from what i want i mean look richard robert smith plays a character now he's
been robert smith for so long that he is that guy but you're also talking to somebody who played tabletop tennis against robert and he told me at one point him and his sister had won the championship for their area in england at you know ping pong you know
and i'm like and he killed me at ping-pong you know 24-1 kind of thing you know or whatever to zero no you got one you got one you can claim one i got one i got one point against damon orban who's like a f an assassin and i got one point against him and i've
never seen him so angry there's nothing worse than a ping-pong assassin there's i honestly there's nothing worse i've played against two in my life robert smith and clawsmine of the scorpions both complete ping-pong assassin and by the
way preening gloating peacocking like not just enough to beat you you kind of got to do that yeah now when i got that point against damon he like threw the bat and was just like like game over i don't want to play anymore
it was like 18-1 he went on just like he took two seconds to beat me the other three points he was so angry he just couldn't even get his head around the fact that i want a point i was like man it's crazy you know it's funny you talk about robert robert smith
being that because someone said to me a few years ago now because we were talking about like the cult of robert smith and the idea of robert smith being robert smith all the time and now like someone said to me robert smith still gets out of the shower you
know and if you imagine if you imagine robert smith with that hair just down here with a towel around him just like putting on deodorant like the rest of us like the whole thing is shattered my generation was everyone puts their
pants on one leg at a time that was the saying from the 50s or 40s or whatever right yeah so i so i used these characters to kind of create distance and then over time it kind of became like a like a like a game of chicken with journalists
you know like how far could they push me and how far could i push them but wasn't that exhausting uh no it was quite it was quite that was quite amusing as long as you were selling records you know what i mean but it detached you
from from you made this music that was so beautiful and emotional and personal and drew us into your world whilst also really enhancing ours then everyone wants to get to know you and you're like you don't get to know me you get to know billy
but but then but then it's like okay i'm a character now it's almost um bill hicks it's almost andy kaufman yeah but i don't like billy but he's a billy's being a to me right now he's not being forthcoming in this interview
or he's doing this or he's doing that and to you that's really funny but eventually it becomes i wonder what the where's the disc you know where does it end like like william's probably going home and going oh yeah maybe i'll push that interview a
little bit too far was funny to me but all they think is like billy's but he's not the guy i want to hang out with well great greatest greatest troll quote i ever saw on me was where somebody wrote i like i don't like billy but i like his music
let me think about that it's like yeah huh there's like in my mind there's no separation you kind of separated it though because you i don't i just can't believe that you wrote a song like soma or a song like um uh oh god any of the songs on molly
crowley stand aside your love i can't imagine you wrote a song that is about as pure a pain to love as billy the character that's william isn't it well it's a bit of both but more more william yeah but but here's the thing the other the other overlay was
identifying which now it's very obvious by the way i've been in the media for 30 years yeah when i figured out circa 1991 that the media was totally foolish and was agenda driven i was shocked it was like a wizard of oz moment like what do you
mean like i thought i thought this was a world of equity and fairness not a world of agenda right so that that engendered in me this other thing that is the third person in the room which is oh i'm gonna i'm gonna turn this thing upside down
i'm gonna use their energy like olay you know like a matador yeah i know they're gonna come at me and i'm gonna lay them and just build up the energy and again it works very well when you're selling records and you're popular
it's not a good formula when you're not as successful because then the articles strictly become about the grudge yeah but in my in my chicago-esque thinking i wanted to ride that ship all the way to the bottom and i did you knew that there was that risk and you were
and you were willing to go there you're willing to say man you know if i'm going to go out it's going to be like it's crash and burn this let's go absolutely yeah why do people still why do why do people still wish or or fantasize the tupac's alive
or uh who who's the other guy jim morrison why is that because they don't want to let go of the character the character of billy was really good for business yeah was it good for william no no it's terrible idea that's the funny one that's what i'm
getting into yeah it's a terrible idea but it was also born of its time and it was born of my youth and born of my insecurity and i don't also don't think i would have survived it i probably would have jumped off a cliff somewhere along the way so
i'm not excusing it that's huge so what i'm trying to say in my own selfish way is these were the things that i did to get from point a to point b at least i'm still here to talk about it because i don't think i would have survived it
look and i say this like i'm use the same qualifier to anybody who who who wishes that somebody like me appreciates success i absolutely do i'm super blessed so what i'm about to say is no mark against that the the act of being
a public person in this culture in american culture over the last 30 years is a absolutely crazy traumatizing thing no one is psychologically or physically prepared as a human machine to deal with that level of weirdness and by the way it's only gotten weirder in
the last 30 years and if you're a sensitive person like i am of course you can't deal with that so that's not an excuse it's just the way it is and so what most people do is they fall into sociopathy they they create a false sense of self they
create a false sense of grandeur and eventually they fall off that cliff when people stop caring i dealt with those things in public in my 20s inverted the process it almost killed me i survived it and now i'm on the other side and i think it's kind of
funny and i'm happy one of the songs that really stood out to me and you might consider this to be one of those beautiful meandering weird little songs i hope not is is dolce knee and um what i love about that song is that it's
it's really essentially for me if you strip away all of the beautiful sonic accoutrement is it's a country song that's what i hear i just hear this beautiful country lullaby song firstly who's who's doing bv's on it uh it's katie cole and sierra swann
okay uh both have toured with us katie more often than sierra but um they're basically friends and and it's like family business you know they come and just help katie did all almost all the vocal arranging on the entire record just
incredible job yeah amazing really amazing she's a an australian-born uh singer-songwriter lives in nashville so she helped you with your melodic approach too she was she was one of the people who helped you go into places vocally that i haven't
heard you go for a while i mean what's really beautiful is that there's moments when you sweep very sharp vocally on some of these songs um almost an octave up and it really catches it's just like wow not to take anything away for katie but
anything i sing is sort of my weird world so katie was basically reacting off of my weirdness and and anybody knows music that's hard to do because i sing a lot of sevenths and ninths and it's almost impossible to harmonize against that stuff so
so the idea of that song and and what i'm saying originally being a sort of kind of a country song and based on what we played on the playlist show a few months ago um you know is there is this this whole kind of world
of songs that we don't know about that have you sitting in your living room with an acoustic guitar and a four track or an a track or in your studio they haven't seen the light of day is there a country corgan record um i've actually been planning on doing
something um i'm friends with hillary willam sorry hilary williams who's hank jr's daughter and granddaughter hank senior and we're talking about doing a bluegrass band possibly with a couple other people um i i really want to do bluegrass music i
it's something in my heart that i hope to do soon i can't wait to hear that i mean i think that song is one of the standouts for me on the record just in terms of the overall experience listening to it there are people in my world not the
band but a business world that don't get that song at all the one you just said dulcinee they fought they fought they not only fought me putting it on the record they fought me putting it out early before the record came out who
in their right mind and i think mark's great and you may not even be referring to him but i think your management your met dude who in there there is a trail of bodies behind you i think they're the last management company to ever work with you ever
you've done everyone else who has the who would possibly say no to you who's gonna do that i'm not gonna name names but there are there are times i have to pull the i am billy corgan and this is my world card yeah that is one of them but
but that's a perfect example where i i thought it was a great song and you hand it in and and people start going yeah i don't really get it it's great to see the album is a triumph man and i'm sending you nothing but love namaste namaste thank you billy bye