Billy Corgan Quotes - Music - http://maxpages.com/sadpeterpan/By_Billy

"Gish was the best representation of where we were at the time."

"A few months ago I went back and listened to it for the first time in a couple of years, and I was surprised at how good it was [laughs], if you know what I mean. It's kind of an artistic thing to dismiss everything you've done before so that you can move on, and I really did that, really hard, after that album. When I went back to listen to it, I forgot about all of the head traumas I went through at the time."

"If the next record is no better than Gish, then we've failed."

"About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful."

"I feel in my heart that I can obscure Siamese Dream with what comes next."

"On an idealistic level, doing a double conceptual album is totally uncool, but I'm gonna pull it off."

"I don't even want to discuss how many people told me that making an album with 28 songs at this point in our career was crazy. Everyone, including the people at our record label, wanted us to just take a nice, safe path, and produce another album like Siamese Dream. My attitude was just the opposite. Thankfully, it hasn't turned out to badly."

"The weird nihilism that permeates Mellon Collie is extremely relevant to what's going on right now. So many kids are intelligent and articulate, but they don't know what to do with themselves."

"[The fourth Pumpkins album will be] a strange hybrid. A very song-y record. Light, not heavy. Not hard rock. The root of the record is based on Americana music. We don't have a drummer, and that's been the biggest influence on the record."

"Babyface is going to produce our next album."- at the Grammy post show

"When people ask what this album was like, I use the word 'arcane,' 'cause I think that it seems to sum up the music best. It¹s kind of like music from the past, but done in a futuristic way. And I think there's natural elements on the album and there are synthetic elements on the album." - on Adore, the next album

"It's like taking all the textures of all past music and trying to apply it to a kind of new song form and it's all just very songy. There's not a lot of guitar, I think there is one guitar solo, that lasts four seconds." - on the music of Adore

"I think people are going to be surprised by the kind of reversal in a lot of ways, but the people that say it's acoustic will be wrong. The people that say it's electronic will be wrong. The people that say it's a Pumpkins' record will be wrong. I will try to make something that is indescribable." - on Adore

On Adore: "This is not a reaction against a negative world. It's a response to a negative world."

On Adore: "This album is definitely me saying goodbye to what I consider my rock and roll. Whatever our little generation's rock and roll was. I mean, it's done, there's no getting around it. You can try to recreate it, you can run it through more fuzz boxes, but
it's done. It's time to move on."

"We made our last album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, thinking that we had reached the end of the line. We didn't kid ourselves. We knew it was the end of that particular era. There was no getting it back."

On Adore: "The first sessions for the album were held shortly after we fired Jimmy from the band. We went right into the studio as a trio. Initially we were very excited and pleased with the results. The whole point was to kind of be very spontaneous. It was literally a case of me writing songs in the morning and us recording them that day. I wanted to get away from the cerebral part of it."

"And interestingly enough, it was the guitar that saved my ass on this album [Adore] because every time I felt that something wasn't working, I'd reach for the guitar and it would tell me where songs needed to go. I always went back to what I know. Because it is the thing that I know, I do know. I'm never quite sure about anything else, but I know how to play the guitar."

"I think the original, 'They're the next Jane's Addiction' things that people said about us in the beginning have been pretty much wiped out."

"It seems to me that references to bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin meant more to me a year ago and all those old things are totally losing importance."

"People always called the Cure gloomy, but listening to the Cure made me happy. There was something about the gloominess that gave me comfort, and I think we're the same way."

"You can't out-solo Jimi Hendrix and you can't out-god Led Zeppelin, and you can't out-pop Iggy Pop."

"Music has basically followed a shallow route for 50 years. People come along, do something really cool and different, everyone copies them, the original gets diluted, distorted, and eventually the diluted - in most cases achieves more success than the thing that started it. And I kinda thought the alternative scene was gonna be different: We thought 'Brave new world!' So it's really wierd to be competing against the imitators. It wasn't always comfortable competing against Nirvana, and it was certainly not healthy living under that shadow at times. But at least there was honor in it. We always respected that it was a great band - Pearl Jam too. But competing against Bush?! It's nothing to get your dick hard about, you know what i mean? There's no mojo in that!"

"Physically, we overpower anybody as a band."

"...When I watch Missy Elliot, it's the same thing as when I watched Soundgarden for the first time. I get that same excitement, and you feel like someone is doing something that is so new. Maybe to some people it sounds like the same old thing, but to me it sounds so fresh. I want to stay there, I want to be there, all the time. I want that feeling all the time. So I had to go through my little mourning period to let it go, and now I've let it go. My band has let it go, and we're ready to move on, into whatever we're going to be. We apologize if anybody doesn't like it, but, you know ... C'est la vie!"

"You give me a fucking kazoo and I'll write you a good song."

"The music is all we care about -- so if that's bad, then we're bad."

"In my philosophy, if any song is not important to you in some sense of the word, then it shouldn't be on the album. Every song has to be important."

"Every year that goes by, I lose that much more motivation to play rock."

"I almost feel that we're more powerful being acoustic than we are electric."

"Music is 99% of my life. But I know I need a break. Besides, if you give people too much, they start to not want it. We need to restrain ourselves."

"I use music as some kind of weird salvation to get away from life."

"The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it's a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too."

"Well, when I was 20 and I met D'arcy, my whole thing was music, music, music, 24-7. And i couldn't understand why D'arcy wasn't music, music, music, 24-7. D'arcy was like, 'I have a fucking life. It can't be that way.' "

"Music's pretty cool and I'm glad to be a part of it. Sometimes when you reach for the stars, you end up in the fucking shit. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in America. I don't believe in rock-and-roll. I believe in me." - from Lollapalooza at Cowning Stadium

"I have a hard time thinking of men trying to sing my songs, because I think my perspective is very much feminine... For me the idea of having a feminine perspective is a willingness to be vulnerable. It's very easy to cock-rock and posture. I can't help but wear my heart on my sleeve-- I'm like nervous endings. That's just the way that I am and, to me, that's very female because it's not a male thing to do. A male thing to do would be to fuckin' posture."

"I've often felt that our B-sides show more of our true character than some of our albums."

"I don't want to achieve the distance of a rock band that's too cool for you to deal with or too whacked out for you to relate to -- but the exact opposite... I want our music to come across like someone whispering into your ear and going right inside your brain. Instead of letting the sound go from our mouths and our hands through a thousand rock pretenses and Spinal Tap-isms, I want it to be like we're right in front of you. That's the kind of intimacy and trust I'd like the band to achieve."

"If you take any band that's ascended to stadium rock and look at their live show it becomes a series of everybody-put-your-hands-in-the-air singalongs. Why is that? Because they're dealing with the lowest common denominator of the musical audience -- the least amount of sophistication and the least amount of emotional connection with the band... And sometimes when we play, I feel that people are only there to hear 'Disarm' or 'Today' and they don't give a fuck about the rest of the show or who we are as people, yet they want some emotion from us."

"The closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets."

"...Instead of taking the 'I'm cool, I hope you adore me' path [with my music], I chose the path of how to connect. I think that's the reason a lot of people feel a deeper connection with our band than other bands, and I also feel that's why people polarize on us. If you don't get it, it seems preposterous; if you do get it, it's really heavy -- it has a weight to it."

"When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before."

"We don't make music for people to take drugs to, we make music for people to live their life."

"Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre."

"Heavy metal is a universal energy -- it's the sound of a volcano. It's rock, it's earth shattering. Somewhere in our primal being we understand."

"I'm going through a real struggle with my voice right now. I feel like my lack of technical ability is really holding me back. I actually started taking voice classes."

"I don't have a problem with my voice - I accept and appreciate it. As many people point out to me, it's the distinction that makes the Pumpkins unique."

"I think I'm a better songwriter than I am a singer, and sometimes our songs suffer because I can't always deliver vocally."

"My earliest memory is of feeling different. My parents told me that I wasn't like other children."

"I wish from Day One, people could would have looked at me and said, 'You're all right, come on, join the team,' but it's never been that way with me. I don't know why."

"I never seemed to fit in. But it made me try to strive for things ten times harder."

"To me, music was about being accepted and escaping from this crummy existence."

"Well, I didn't make the team, so rock 'n roll was the next thing."

"I was kind of a cosmic child. As a little kid, I remember wondering about God and the universe. I just remember reading bits of National Geographic magazine and watching shows on public television and being entranced by this thread of spirituality running throughout the world. There seemed to be this kind of secret chant for forgiveness and spiritual redemption. There was something mysteriously alluring about it, almost sensual."

"As a child I learned that it was more advantageous to be this creation than it was to be who I really am. But my personality is so strong that it kind of bubbled out from underneath, and it was tough to distinguish who was the faker and who was real."

"Back in 1979, I was bigger than most kids by a lot. When I was 12 I led my baseball team in home runs. By the time I was 14, I had been totally passed up. That's when I turned to guitar." - on the year 1979

"I know what it's like to be 15-years-old and live in white suburban America."

"If you can imagine, I was more emotional than I am now -- with nowhere to put it [laughs]. Imagine that same kind of twisted heart locked in this 18-year-old body with nothing to do. It wasn't pretty." - on being a teenager

"As a 28 year old who's lived long enough to know the difference, I know now that the feelings I felt an 16 were not necessarily correct. But however overly dramatic, the desperation and hopelessness I felt at 16 was my reality."

"I was a jock, but I wasn't on the sports team. I played guitar, but I didn't hang out with the stoners. I just couldn't hang in any way, and when you're young and you can't hang, you oppose. So I was anti-everything, fuck you all."

"My first real kiss was with somebody I really, really liked, and still like, and it was in my bedroom in the suburbs. There was no music playing, and it was after school, I think. When you're young like that, and especially being as weird as I was. I don't think that it was so much a romantic love as it was a love of the spirit and the connection that two people have at that age. We still have that same connection. It stopped articulating itself as a romance, but we're still really good friends. I love her very much."

"For a 6-foot-3 guy with no hair and a whiny voice, I've done all right."

"Well, pretty much everything from casts, to breasts, to you name it. Cars." - on Regis and Kathie Lee when asked what the weirdest thing he's ever been asked to autograph

"When you're nobody and have nothing to show for anything that you've ever done you never question where people are coming from beyond the simplest of motivations. But these days I really question why people talk to me, and it's sad. I don't think people are malicious, I think they're just attracted to celebrity in general. You have people coming up just because they want to be able to tell someone that they met someone, and I don't think they realize that it takes away from your own life."

"So success has changed my life in that way, but it's also changed the way that I think. I feel more free to do whatever I want to do musically, because I've always thought that you should take a success as a reinforcement for what you're doing and, rather than get more concerned, you should go the other way and get more bold."

"Why do I need 1,000 people validating my existance?"

"Fame and fortune was the mythological means of escape. My myth was rock-goddom. I saw that as a means to become one who has no pain."

"I no longer feel the need to torch my soul in public, because I don't think it's really worth it... You have to decide what's worth it publicly and what's not worth it personally. That's the battle, artistically, at the moment. I could take the doubters and nay-sayers and make them believers, but there's such a personal toll that goes with it. I have to ask myself: is it worth killing myself or reaching deep inside myself to prove our worth to somebody who's just as likely to buy a Mariah Carey record?"

"Actually, I was having dinner with Michael Stipe, of R.E.M. when our second album went platinum, which up until that point was the highest success we'd ever had. And he turned to me during dinner and said, 'Welcome to the deep waters, kid.' I'll never forget that."

"At one point, I think he [Michael Stipe, of R.E.M.] played into the enigma, and then the enigma came to haunt him. And then he kind of walked away from it, which is something I really respect about him. The modern-day version of Michael is actually a very accessible, really lovely person -- really sweet and there's no bullshit. I don't see somebody who's trying to live up to this myth image."

"One of the other reasons that we quit having journalists come here is because they would kind of hang out for several days, and they'd see me around at the clubs, and the story would get written and it would be me and my 'disciples' or my 'acolytes.' The word acolyte - that's like fuck you. These are my friends, but because they're not Billy Corgan or Helena Christiansen, they become my 'posse' or my 'followers,' and it's like, fuck you for insulting my friends like that. That's so fucking incredible to me."

"I don't necessarily believe that the sting of failure is a bad thing. It gives you a certain amount of freedom to just say 'fuck it!'."

"Nobody wants to hear about justice unless there's injustice, especially in America. We don't care about sexual harassment until the president gets a blow job, you know."

"It's like nobody knows I'm also a sports geek who sits around and watches games all day."

"'Disarm' is about when I became an asshole."

"My Mother came to a Smashing Pumpkins gig once, and I was wearing a dress. She was very upset. She said, 'Everyone's gonna think your a fag.' I said,'Well, they already think I'm an asshole.' "

"There's a really a cold, cold side to my personality that I'm not really comfortable with. I'm constantly dealing with that side of my personality versus my overly sentimental side. There's just a side that's a real motherfucker side; it's nothing I want to admit or even look at. It's where a lot of my strength lies. It's been the part of me that's been able to steel my spine against situations that probably would have broken a lot of people, or caused them to jump off the loop."

"The Smashing Pumpkins was never meant to be a small band. It was going to either be a big band, or a no band."

"It could have been any vegetable."

"It's The Smashing Pumpkins. That was my stupid idea."

"Certainly the media saturation is way worse. Now you turn on the TV, and there's fashion and culture and news aimed directly at 16-year-olds. I've met kids who get laid at 10, 12. I didn't lose my virginity until I was 18. Kids are acting grown-up, but they're not grown-up inside."

"I hate how in magazine pictures, they always stick me somewhere in the back. It means they don't think I'm the cute one."

"For, like, two years, every interview was, and occasionally still is, 'Don't you guys hate each other?' "

"The title of a song is like the wrapping on a present."

"Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. And the light is the color red and red reminds you of the color your not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song 'Cow.' "

"Was it a hit song? The answer is no. Did it have a video? No. Do people cite it as their favorite song? No. Do they scream for it at concerts? No. But does it mean something to me? Yes. Would I do it again? Yes." - on "Spaceboy "

"It's about the girlfriend who left me last year. I tried to put all my anger in those words, even though I'm just as much to blame for the break-up. 'Soma' is based on the idea that a love relationship is almost the same as opium: it slowly puts you to sleep, it soothes you, and gives you the illusion of sureness and security. Very deceivable." - on "Soma"

"I have a younger brother who has a rare genetic chromosomal disorder. He's not a mongoloid, he's not retarded, but he's definitely different. He's like 17 now. And there's a lot of things where I identify with him, cause I went through very similar things-not because of anything genetic, but my whole life I was told there was something wrong with me, that I was different. I mean, all I ever heard was, 'You're a freak, you're different, you're not like everyone else. ' " - on "Spaceboy" in 1993

"There's a lot of me in that lyric. There's certainly an acknowledgment of that self-absorbed woe-is-me thing. The chorus says a lot: 'In your sad machines you'll forever stay.' It's a wink back at the overly dramatic 18-year-old me." - on the "death rock boy" lyric in "Here Is No Why"

"The basic thing is just fuck everybody. It's that feeling where no one understands: 'Who the fuck are my friends? Fuck you. Fuck everybody. Fuck everything.' It's just that thought - pure frustration." - on "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)"

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