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Billy Corgan: We were working on a song that reminded us of something Tommy would play. I made a joke: We needed someone to play like Tommy on this song. I was like, "[Let's get] the real Tommy." I was probably on the phone with Tommy the next day. I went to LA to see him. He said no. Tommy wanted to play the whole thing.Were you a Tommy Lee fan before that?
Oh yeah. I was an old Crue fan, going back pretty much to the first [Motley Crue album]. I've known Tommy socially since the early 90s. He'd come to our shows every once in a while—and [current Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Jeff Schroeder] was a huge Crue fan. He grew up in LA, so for him Crue is legendary, so it was a really easy fit. On paper it looks stranger than it really is.How do you choose your dramatic album titles?
I never get into that because I don't really know how to be honest. These things just pop into my head. When I was a kid, I would just write stuff down that popped into my head and made no sense. It just kinda became part of my inner poetry, for lack of a better way to put it. I was really a huge fan of William Burroughs when I was a kid.Do you write your albums in a stream of consciousness?
It's all [subconscious] really. I just do a little tweaking in the end, to make sure it makes some kinda sense.Does it bother you when people mock your dramatic style?
I haven't seen that. I don't really read any of that stuff. What are the jokes? You have my curiosity.
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No more melodramatic than Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Last time I checked, [Mellon Collie] sold 10 million copies. Not to make myself seem the victim—because, like, every kid gets bullied in their own way—but actually I was bullied as a kid for being melodramatic. I was bullied as a kid for being into reading, in the arts and stuff like that, so to me that kind of criticism is more about our repressive, fearful society. When people attack words, I always find it really interesting because words are really quite innocent for the most part.I'm a heterosexual, which in many ways makes me stranger because I'm definitely not supposed to be sensitive. I grew up around jocks and the whole thing. I played sports and I heard all those things and I always thought it was a bit strange because to me the greatest men I have ever known are people who are inwardly balanced.How does this album differ from previous Pumpkins records?
There are the obvious things, like who's on them. I don't really know. All I've ever tried to do is be reflective of where I am. If I'm in a lame place then the records are lame. I don't really know what else to do. I really am an intuitive artist. I pretend to be an intellectual, but my work is really a guess. People say, "Why do an eight-hour synthesizer show?" I woke up on Tuesday and it seemed like a good idea. I just have a kind of a nose for creating a storm around me, so that's a bit dramatic too. Yeah, I'm an attention whore too, but that's part of being a performance artist.
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It's a totally different universe—you were dealing with an incredible level of repression. Why is that repression there? What is it that will send somebody off like a bomb? It's those hidden, unspoken biases that are the source of great art. Having been exposed to performance art in my late teens, and watching someone smearing themselves naked with some chocolate or something [made you think], Oh what the fuck is it? But then I would later [find] that I had a reaction. Why would I have a reaction? Big deal, he just smeared chocolate on himself.People make fun of your band, but your sales are pretty damn good. What makes your music so appealing to people?
I think the question, which is a fantastic one that no one ever asks me, is [hard to answer] because the substantive things that make the band unique are not easily cleaned apart by somebody's opinion. No one sings like me, for better or for worse—you know my voice. My two-year-old nephew can point to the radio and say, "That's Uncle Billy." You can't imitate my voice. There is only one voice like mine. Two: I'm a songwriter. I know my shit. I studied the greatest. I've worked with some of the best people on the production side, like Alan Moulder, Roy Thomas Baker, Butch Vig—I've learned from the masters.I've learned how to make records the old-fashioned way, and I've been blessed with a cast of musicians who somehow find some kind of common ground with me, whether it is short or for long, to help me navigate this language which I don't understand and I don't pretend to understand. Look at the album cover. I mean I took that picture like on a Sunday morning [at] like 6 AM. Why it turned out that way, I don't know. Why I named the album that, I don't know. Why is the last song of the album about a guy and a girl in a car? I don't know.I'm still here. You are held up like kind of a piñata, but they forget that you are still there, so how much of a piñata can you be? I could very easily name 57 bands from my generation that got just as much hype and just as much record company pushes as we did. Sometimes it just comes down to talent and a little bit of moxie.Despite all the bullshit you have to deal with, you sound pretty happy.
For me it starts with the belief that—and it is personal—that there is justice in the cosmos. The first 28 to 30 years of my life, my whole self-worth was judged on whether or not I was worth something to someone else. When you wake up from that dream, you realize, Wow. I can't really determine my worth this way, because if I do I'm going to kill myself all because I'm being told constantly I have no worth. Everybody knows what that feels like. You don't have to be a star to figure that out.Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.