Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan told INews.
Corgan went into the sessions prepared to make his final record. “Have you ever had the fantasy where you were going to write a suicide note?” he asks. “The letter people would read after you die, where you say all the things you wouldn’t have the courage to say? It felt a little like that. [Pumpkins’ 1993 album] Siamese Dream was the only other record that had that same level of confession: something needs to die, something needs to live, something needs to be let go of, something needs to prosper.” Not that we should be taking the ‘death’ element literally. “I don’t mean to make light of death, as it’s a very serious subject. We’re talking about a symbolic death. It involves a lot of complicated forces. There’s grief, there’s acceptance, there’s forgiveness and there’s hope that, by this act of celestial contrition, you’ll be able to enter a new space. I like to think I have.”
Corgan told Daily Herald, “If you would’ve told me 30 years ago, ‘Yeah, when you’re 50, you’ll still be putting out albums,’ (I would’ve thought), ‘Oh, I must’ve done something right,'” Corgan said. “But the path I took to get here, the mistakes I’ve made — the good things, the bad things — that whole journey is so strange. It’s almost hard to put into any kind of words. And the only way that you can kind of define it seems to be by still picking up a guitar and singing a new song.”
