In a new NME interview, James Iha revealed his thoughts on D’arcy Wretzky’s lack of involvement in The Smashing Pumpkins reunion.
“It’s different if you lose a key and founding member, but it’s all been positive,” says Iha of life after D’Arcy, very diplomatically. “At this point, our lives are so different to how it started when we were 20-years-old. What we have going on away from the band is just as important. It makes you appreciate being able to do music for a living.”
He also detailed why he wanted to reconnect with Corgan.
“As the years have passed I felt like I wanted a positive reconnection. To not have any bad blood,” Iha tells us of why he got back in touch with Corgan. “When we had dinner we weren’t talking like, ‘Let’s put the band back together and do a tour’. We were just trying to move into the present as far as being friends.”
“It took me right back to being in my dad’s house,” says Corgan of their early reformation sessions. “I had really weird sense-memory things, like looking across the room and being like, ‘Wow, this is a really long journey’. Because Jimmy and I had obviously kind of come and gone, so I’d already been through that with him. But to have it with James after having started the whole thing with him and…” he smiles and excitedly starts measuring the width of the table. “You know, my dad’s bedroom literally was the size of this area we’re in right now. Imagine there’s my bed, and here’s the stereo. The room to work in was this big. So when we would play we were like right up in each other’s faces.”
Iha also told The Ringer about reconnecting with Corgan.
“For me, that’s where it started,” Iha says. “Having a kind of reconciliation and starting a dialogue where we hadn’t spoken in years. If you put yourself out there, somebody is either going to respond or not respond. And [Billy] did. He could have chosen to ignore it.”
