THE SMASHING PUMPKINS' CORGAN: 'I'm Very Excited To Be Playing My Music'

Jonathan Zwickel of The Seattle Times recently conducted an interview with THE SMASHING PUMPKINS leader Billy Corgan. An exceprt from the chat follows below.

The Seattle Times: It's hard hearing music from your childhood without nostalgia or sentimentality overshadowing immediacy and true appreciation.

Corgan: Yeah. The thing I've learned over the years is to play in the moment you're in. You can't go back. You have to play those [old] songs, when you do play them, with a 2010 perspective. You can't try to recreate the mosh pit in '92. It's just not gonna happen.

There's a lot of material that I've tried to play in practice and I just say to the band, "No, it doesn't feel right." The band feels very contemporary, and that's the best way I can describe it. We're standing on that knife-edge of sounding contemporary and not getting sentimental. I think sentimentality with music is death.

At the end of the day, no matter what my roots are, I'm basically playing some bastardized form of pop music. And pop music and sentimentality is a bad mixture. So the way I look at it — for example, we're doing a version of my song "Star". And the way I approach it and the way I try to sing the lyric is I'm not trying to be the 25 year old that was singing about child abuse. I'm standing there as a 43-year-old man that has a different take on the world. So the lyric comes out of me differently. And I don't treat it as this sort of precious moment from my life, I treat it as a very relevant thing that has a different significance as a 43-year-old person as opposed to the 25-year-old that I was when I wrote that. I've learned a lot from Bob Dylan from that approach.

The Seattle Times: Does it seem like the audience is picking up on that?

Corgan: Listen, buddy, who knows what the audiences pick up on, you know what I mean? [laughs] I learned long ago to just do what you believe in and let the chips fall where they may. I'm constantly astounded by the way people interpret what I do, for better and for worse. At this point, they see ghosts where there aren't ghosts and hear voices where there aren't voices. I'm in a happy place. I'm very excited to be playing my music. It's a really good time for me in my music life. I feel a sense of accomplishment to even be standing here in a healthy place with a healthy band. Fans are excited about the shows. I just don't get caught up in that anymore because that's too much of a rollercoaster.

I just had to come to a point as a man where I had to be OK with my value system and not get caught up in anybody else's. Because, believe me, I've heard it for 25 years, the [expletive] indie world's crap about how I should be, how you should be, how you should dress, how you should think, your shows, no guitar solos, all that crap. You just get so tired of hearing it.

Read the entire interview from The Seattle Times.