Billy Corgan Reveals Emotional Frances Bean Cobain Secret

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Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan revealed that ‘only a few people’ really matter to him in his life, and two of those people are Frances Bean Cobain and her mother Courtney Love.

Corgan told the Los Angeles Times, “I think at some point you look at your life and think there’s only a few people that really matter; Courtney, and by extension Frances [Bean Cobain], matter to me.

Courtney’s been living in England, and she’s very happy. I’ve said stupid stuff, she’s said stupid stuff. But we talk every once in a while, and it’s totally lucid. It’s a joy to just celebrate that. We made it through, and there’s certainly plenty of wreckage along the way … but it’s more of a family bond for us.

Courtney once said, ‘He stopped writing hits when he stopped writing about me,’ which of course is not true,” Corgan says with a smirk. “But I like to tell people … ‘She stopped having hits when I stopped writing them!’”

Corgan also recently told Zane Lowe on Apple Music about the hidden violence in language, “The simplest illustration I could, and I don’t want to offend anybody, but I could say five words in a row, and you wouldn’t think anything of it, and I can switch the order of those five words and you would be offended and never talk to me. So, William Burroughs talked very pointedly about how there’s hidden violence in language, and that obviously influenced Bowie as well.

By moving words around, Dylan did it too. You take two words, you put them in one way, reverse them, suddenly there’s violence there. And so, probably around the time I started working with Rick Rubin on the Ogilala album, I started working more deeply with this kind of word violence, in a different kind of folkloric way than maybe I had done in Mellon Collie, which was probably the first explosion of that kind of lyrical approach.

I guess what I would say in the binary choice way, is I’ll write something, and if it makes me feel uncomfortable I think there’s something there. Why does that make me feel uncomfortable? Because most things don’t make me uncomfortable. So, I try to use my own discomfort as a guide to sort of say, well, there’s something in that language there.

Even if at times I don’t know what it means, I just kind of get a physical sense of there’s something there, but who knows what it is? And of course, when you apply it to the onomatopoeia of the way you sing something, the voice of course has its own language. And then magically, if you put all the scenes together, it starts to evoke, suddenly somebody’s getting a civil war memory, or a memory that they shouldn’t have. That’s the beauty of multi-dimensional music, if it’s presented in a particular way.”