The mention of Billy Corgan in last week’s article on Breaking Benjamin had me wondering what The Smashing Pumpkins have been up to lately. After a couple busy years spent on the road in support of their 2007 release, Zeitgeist, things have been relatively quiet on the Pumpkins’ front. Word from the band’s camp, though, is that they have a brand new concept album in the works. And it’s a whopper.
According to Pumpkins’ founder Billy Corgan, the new album, entitled Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, will include 44 songs that will be unveiled to the public in a most innovative way. Instead of fans having to wait out the time it would take to pull off such a massive undertaking as Teargarden, the infamously unconventional Corgan intends to allow fans to download the songs as the band finishes them, no strings attached.
With some 53 songs already written for the record, Corgan is confident he has enough material to work with and hopes to have the first song ready for download around Halloween, with each subsequent release coming shortly thereafter until all 44 songs are out.
Corgan will also release eleven 4-song EPs, and when the record is completed, all 44 songs will be included in a Kaleidyscope box set. The wily Corgan, one step ahead of the fans who may opt to forego the EPs for the box set, says that the box set won’t be a recompilation of the limited edition pieces and will include artwork and bonus tracks.
Corgan’s inspiration for Teargarden by Kaleidyscope comes from the tarot, specifically the Fool’s Journey as a metaphor for life. He is approaching the work by breaking down the journey into phases that are represented by different tarot characters, following along the naïve, unsullied, newly born Fool through the life experiences he must assimilate in order to become whole. Sounds pretty trippy. Could The Smashing Pumpkins be revisiting their psychedelic roots, I wonder? After all, Corgan counts Pink Floyd as one of his biggest influences.
At a towering 6’3”, with his pale skin, shaved head and otherworldly aura, Corgan, who has suffered from depression for much of his life, is the Pumpkins’ lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter and has been the one constant since the volatile band’s inception in 1988. After a string of hits in the ‘90s, the Pumpkins disbanded and Corgan headed for the greener pastures of a short-lived solo career and branched out into poetry with a published work that debuted on The New York Times Best Seller List.
Always a lightning rod for controversy, Corgan has a history of challenging his naysayers and taking on the music industry. He has strong opinions on the problems with contemporary culture, has ripped on that star-making machine, American Idol, has weighed in on everyone from Radiohead to Amy Winehouse and Brittany Spears, and has even trashed his former bandmates on his MySpace page. That Corgan should tap into the domain of Jung and the mystics speaks of his own evolving journey and deepening spirituality. He recently launched Everything From Here to There, a website dedicated to open discussion of the concepts of Mind-Body-Soul integration.
Corgan is a self-taught guitarist whose father, himself a blues guitarist, denied him formal lessons when he doubted Billy’s commitment to music as a teenager. Although Corgan is not widely known for his guitar playing, he has been praised within guitar circles as one of the finest and most underrated rock guitarists of the ‘90s. Rolling Stone ranked his solo for “Soma,” from 1993s Siamese Dream, #24 on their list of top guitar solos.
Corgan has played various guitars over the years including a customized '57 Reissue Fender Stratocaster and a ’72 Gibson ES-335. He used a baby blue ’74 Strat on the recording of “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, the lead single from the Mellon Collie album, which won The Smashing Pumpkins a Grammy in 1997 for Best Hard Rock Performance. On the recent Zeitgeist tour, Corgan used a Schecter C-1.
Joining the 42-year-old Corgan on the new album is 19-year-old Mike Byrne, who wasn’t even conceived yet when The Smashing Pumpkins first hit the Chicago music scene. Byrne, a veteran of a number of Portland, Oregon, bands, started listening to the Pumpkins when he was 13 and saw the band for the first time two years ago on the Zeitgeist tour. Byrne was a freshman at Berklee College of Music when he auditioned for and won the seat of longtime Pumpkins’ drummer Jimmy Chamberlin after Chamberlin left the band this past March.
Say what you will about Billy Corgan, the man is ambitious. As he sets out on his creative odyssey, it will be interesting to see how releasing an album piecemeal pans out, and where such soul work ultimately takes him.
