Billy Corgan
Billy Corgan
William Patrick "Billy" Corgan Jr. is an American musician, songwriter, producer, television writer, poet, and professional wrestling promoter best known as the lead singer, guitarist, and sole permanent member of The Smashing Pumpkins. Formed by Corgan and guitarist James Iha in Chicago, Illinois, in 1987, the band quickly gained steam with the addition of bassist D'arcy Wretzky and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. The band's direction has largely been driven by Corgan through his confessional lyrics, grandiose production values, and virtuosic musical...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth17 March 1967
CityElk Grove Village, IL
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
Every year that goes by, I lose that much more motivation to play rock.
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.
I never seemed to fit in. But it made me try to strive for things ten times harder.
My view of the world is always tempered by the fact that there are people who are less fortunate than I am.
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.'
We have a problem with any labels that people try to hang on us, because all it does is drag you down.
Smashing Pumpkins has never been a band about hit songs.
If there was a simple ethic for the band, it was that we want to be able to do whatever we want to do.
It's wonderful to read interviews by old blues guys - they talk about all their influences, they talk about who taught them how to play, and who they saw, and how they were determined to play that way.
To re-embrace what I once loved about music has been a warming process for me, because it's a good, earned feeling now.
The things I'm guided to do are really strange to me.
In my particular instance, I came from a family that didn't have anything. Everything I earned in life I made. Myself. With songs that I wrote.