In a new Creative Independent interview, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan was asked if success warps the simple joy of making songs.
No. I never had that problem so much. I was more like an egoist who was always looking for a mandate, and when I had it I didn’t always carefully consider my options. I was more of a slash and burn, scorched Earth kind of person—hence making a record like Adore after Mellon Collie. I could say something like, “Adore was exactly the right move at exactly the right time and the only mistake I made was not making sure there was hit singles.” The character flaw in that moment was that I got everything I wanted, I did everything the way I wanted to do. Through force of will, I got the vision I was after and it held. You can still hear it. It didn’t wither away with time, but my ego got in the way of just being pragmatic.
Rick Rubin actually recorded a song for that album called “Let Me Give the World to You.” It didn’t fit in the sequence so I tacked it on at the end and it actually worked. It was like a sunshine coda after a dark journey. I remember being in this $20,000 a month mansion overlooking Los Angeles, living the dream, right? I’m in the pool and I’m listening to the album and I remember listening to the whole sequence and going, “Okay, is ‘Let Me Give The World to You’ going to work at the end of the sequence?” I’m thinking, “Yeah, that’s pretty good. I can live with it,” and knowing it was like my ace in my pocket. If you need a single, there it is. I handed it to the label and three days later they called and they said, “Okay, we want ‘Let Me Give The World to You’ to be the first single.” My immediate reaction was “Fuck no!” and I took it off the album entirely. It was like, you’re not going to subvert my masterwork by releasing the pop single first. Instead, we set up the whole thing by making the weird “Ava Adore” video first, which is influential in its own right, but if I was pragmatic, I could’ve had it all.
This is all Monday morning quarterbacking I realize, but the point is, I had everything in my axis but my vision was guided not by gross sociopathic survival—which is the hallmark of the music business, probably the entire entertainment business—but this other kind of survival which was, “My voice must stay intact no matter what.” That’s a different negotiating tactic. The voice is what keeps me here and the survival comes from the means of production which sustains the voice… and that was the loop for 25 years. Eventually you exhaust that.
