Smashing Pumpkins fans recently asked Billy Corgan if James Iha and Jeff Schroeder were absent on the band’s new record CYR due to their heavy synth sound. Alternative Nation transcribed remarks from the fan Q&A. Billy Corgan also recently detailed plans to recreate Gish.
Are James and Jeff playing synths now or are they not involved on the new record?
“Not a very bright question.”
James is playing keyboards on the record correct? New songs are great.
“James is playing guitar on these songs. If people can’t delineate sounds between keys and guitars (for one can make keys sound like guitars and guitars sound like keys) then I don’t know what to tell you.”
Corgan also recently told Apple Music about his influences, “My natural tendency to just want to explore. Like I said, I’m a digger. So kind of once I’ve exhausted something, Bowie is obviously a model for that for me. So was Led Zeppelin, so were the Beatles. Sabbath, even.
Go totally into your trip and just kind of move on. I mean, great filmmakers do that, great classical composers do that. But pop is different because the expectation windows are different, and I understand that. But now we’ve entered this weird zone where all time is happening all the time, so young fans are finding our music from 20 years ago, which is great, and I could see why some of them might go, ‘Wait, I don’t understand this.’
But then you find these other kids who have done the deep dive and they followed the thread all the way through, and they’re like, ‘I really like what you’ve done.'”
