You can never go home again. Billy Corgan knows this, but sometimes you’ve got to try.
When Revolver catches up with the Smashing Pumpkins’ bandleader, it’s been mere days since the release of Aghori Mhori Mei — a song cycle with an album title alluding to the Hinduist Aghori sect’s philosophies on rebirth, and also the veteran group’s attempt at revisiting the excitable mindset of their early days, without explicitly copying the sonics.
Interestingly, the talk also takes places shortly after a hometown show at Chicago, Illinois’ Wrigley Field. The Smashing Pumpkins are once again on tour with Green Day, thought the circumstances are different than when they’d first traveled together in the Nineties — for instance, the Bay Area pop-punkers were the openers on Lollapalooza ‘94, but are topping the bill three decades later. On another level, even though the Pumpkins were back in their old neighborhood, performing in the Cubs’ 84,000-capacity baseball stadium for the first time literally put them on a new playing field. Back when Corgan founded the band, they didn’t even hold concerts at Wrigley.
“We used to rehearse across the street, above a place called the Cubby Bear,” Corgan reveals. “We would be loading our equipment on game days and Cubs fans would be mocking us because we were all goth and dressed in black. And if you lived in that neighborhood like we did back in the Eighties, the atmosphere of the ballpark dominated everything. If you’re playing a gig and there’s a Cubs game, no one’s coming because traffic is bad and no one can get parking.
He continues: “Fast forward 36 years and there you are in center field, where you wanted to play [baseball] as a kid and [now] you’re playing a concert… it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really wild.’”
Corrine Luxon
To be fair, the arc of the Smashing Pumpkins has been pretty mind-blowing across the board. Between the release of 1991’s Gish and 1993’s Siamese Dream — and through a staggeringly gorgeous assault of psychedelic hooks, shoegaze-abrasive layering and metal-adjacent heaviness — the group became vanguards of the decade’s developing alternative-rock movement. By 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, they were one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
As with any decades-long project, the Smashing Pumpkins’ profile has ebbed and flowed since; many band members have come and gone. But the group remain iconic, better yet while not preserving themselves in retro-fied, nostalgic amber. On the one hand, the past several years have found Corgan reunited onstage and in the studio with founding members James Iha (guitar) and Jimmy Chamberlin (drums), but they’ve also entered a bold new live era featuring guitar-shredder Kiki Wong and a slamming stage show incorporating professional grapplers from the National Wrestling Alliance, the promotion Corgan has owned since 2017 — a rock-and-wrestling docuseries called Billy Corgan’s Adventure’s in Carnyland premiered earlier this year.
Musically, Corgan and Co. have also been in constant evolution. Last year’s Atum, for instance, was delivered as an epic-scope, three-part, synth-forward opera. And though the band were consciously conjuring the spirit of their younger selves on Aghori Mhori Mei, the new record is hardly a fixed-point journey. Instead, they’re worm-holing through a cosmos of bleak-lit prog (“Edin”), swooning alt-rock (“Pentagrams”), fantasy-film synth-phonic gauziness (“Murnau”) and horns-raising classic metal chugginess (“999,” “Sicarus”). If you go into a modern Smashing Pumpkins record only expecting the Big Muff-incinerating sounds of their first big wave, you’re absolutely missing the point.
“Most people’s impression of the band is not accurate,” Corgan explains. “They think we’re a heavier band than we are. They think we’re more angsty than we are. I don’t mean this dismissively, but the common person on the street or the guy in the airport thinks I’m the ‘rat in a cage guy.’ That’s what he remembers, you know? But that’s not the band.”
“We recognize that our musical voice is far more interesting, complex and heartfelt than we are as people — we’re flawed people,” he admits, “[The] organizing principle that I set into motion [is] that we could basically be any band from any era at any time. We could be a metal band one moment and a folk band the next. We could be Tim Hardin and Black Sabbath. That was such a strange concept to people [in the beginning]. It was like, ‘Why would you want to even bother with that? Give me more ‘rat in a cage!’’ And we were like, ‘Who cares?’”
Speaking with Revolver, Corgan further weighs in on kicking against grunge-era nostalgia with Aghori Mhori Mei, the thrill of reimagining their live show’s nightly nut-shots, and how he’s always been playing the long-game with the Smashing Pumpkins.
You’d said in the lead-up to Aghori Mhori Mei that this is an album where you’re trying to reconnect to the band’s past — the ’90-to-’96 period, specifically. This isn’t a retro-sounding record, though. What did revisiting that mindset mean to you, or for the morale of the project?
BILLY CORGAN Well, when you’re young you have a very heightened sense of culture. One night, you’re in a bar and you’re listening to Teenage Fanclub. The next night, you’re at a gig watching some band from England that’s having a moment. You’re being influenced by so many things. You have such a heightened sense of what is exciting, but you don’t necessarily have the skillset readily available to produce the sound that you’re after. So, it’s a lot of trial and error.
The way we worked between those 1990-to-96 years always started with a piece of music that we felt excited by. And it wasn’t until we had that piece of music that we would apply all the other resources, which would be melody and lyrics and solos and stuff like that.
Once I got more skilled at writing, as I got into my 30s, I could make something decent out of anything. But then people would complain and say, “Where’s the visceral quality that I recognize?” And I was like, “Well, that’s like saying Bob Dylan in ’66 is more visceral than Bob Dylan in ’76,” or something. You’ve said what you said in the previous decade. So, you move on and life changes.
To your point, there were plenty of riffs that came out in this process that would have probably worked for an album in 1993, [but] didn’t excite us in 2024. It’s certainly not some sort of revisionist history lesson where we go back and play in the old sandbox and get out the fuzz pedals. That was never the intention.
Are you touching on this theme at all on the new record’s first song, “Edin”? There’s a line in there about paying the toll for leaving… you’ve left the Garden, as it were…
I haven’t really sat and thought about the lyrics too much since I wrote them, but yeah… that’s interesting. That line, “pay the toll for leaving…” — you’re identifying the right thing. Because what’s the whole ethos of the album? You try to go home again. And even before you start, you know you can’t go home again, but you still [try].
I’m sure many people have had that experience where they take a left turn one day and go, “Oh, let’s go by the old house” — in my case, that’s in Glendale Heights, Illinois, and I haven’t lived there since I was 18 years old. So, you stand there and technically you’re home again, right? You’re standing in front of your house where all this stuff happened — where I started playing guitar. But you’re a different person. That house isn’t yours anymore. It’s just a place. Then it’s like something out of a Paulo Coelho book: “Home is in the heart.”
I just enjoyed the exercise of looking very starkly at where we were, where we came from and where we arrived. And part of that is there’s been so much peacemaking in the band over the last seven years, with James coming back and realigning as people around the idea that the Pumpkins can still lead us. We used to say back in the day that the band was more important than “us.” People would try to make it, “Oh, Billy, you’re the band.” I was like, “No, you don’t understand. We’re all serving this greater thing called the Smashing Pumpkins,” which only made sense to us [internally].
Corrine Luxon
Are there any differences in the way you worked with James and Jimmy back then, compared to now.
In terms of working modality, it’s almost identical — literally 99 percent the same.
What was it like to add someone new like Kiki to the live dynamic then? How has she changed the vibe?
Well, let me start with a compliment for Kiki. I’m not making this personal on anybody in particular, but I would say that every person that’s played with us who wasn’t in the original band — and I’m going back to the Nineties, because we had other people come out with us even then — has struggled with “how do I fit in this structure?”
We’re very used to it. Because one minute we’re playing a new wave song, and the next we’re playing something super heavy metal. And then it’s a folk song. It’s hard for musicians to follow the language. [And also] emotionally, I think people struggle with ‘how do I fit in?’
We’re not asking them to be the musician in the back. We’re asking them to play in the band in this moment. Kiki’s the first musician we’ve ever had that’s come in from the outside and just grabbed the thing and made it her own. It’s remarkable. She’s really the right personality. She just gets it.
How so?
It’s an understanding that the band’s dynamic changes every night. We don’t play “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” the same two nights in a row. The band’s built to be an emotional vehicle. So, depending on the emotional interpretation of the evening, the songs get more blue or darker or prettier — it’s hard to explain unless you live it.
And so, what Kiki really does is she’s very much, “I’m in this moment. I’m just going to lean right into it. I’m not going to be shy about it. I’m just going to jump in with both feet and I’m going to go wherever that takes me.” It’s awesome, because that’s the way we are, too.
Somewhat on the idea that “Bullet” changes every night, the band have likewise been an ever-evolving entity over the years. How did the Aghori sect and their ideas on rebirth play into the broader themes of Aghori Mhori Mei, or even just living as the Smashing Pumpkins?
We grew up in an era where [The Who’s] Roger Daltrey sang, “I hope I die before I get old.” When Mick Jagger turned 30, they were asking him, “Are you getting too old for this?” We were told as little kids that rock & roll was strictly for the young. But of course, the Baby Boomer generation — which the Stones and the Who were a part of — elongated that equation into something that nobody could have anticipated… including them!
[But] if you think about it, how many rock bands past 40-to-55 have ever written a great record? Invariably, you live in the shadow of what people perceive you did in your 20s. And at some point, the energy of that starts to play tricks with your mind. You meet somebody in an airport and all they want to do is talk about seeing you in ’94. It permeates your living consciousness. And if you’re a weak spirit, you start to become what the audience wants you to become. You’re up there in the flannel shirt waving the grunge flag or some shit. If you know anything about us, though, we resisted those modalities in the Nineties. We [already] did [that] when we were supposedly at our peak.
So, to have survived not only that generation — including just living, but also the musical trends of the times — we’re able to kind of come from a very true organic place. [It’s] not one of defiance. If you listen to Aghori Mhori Mei, it’s not a middle finger. But we refuse to be defined by the culture that has continually rejected us.
Aghori Mhori Mei isn’t solely a heavy-in-your-face record, but you’re really embracing the chug on songs like “War Dreams of Itself” and “999.” What can you say about leaning into those kinds of dynamics?
Obviously they moved at a different pace than we did, but if you look at the way Sabbath or Zeppelin [evolved] over the course of their tenure, there’s a certain mature way to rock that isn’t just Led Zeppelin I or Master of Reality. There’s a sophistication that you can tap into, like, “Is there a way to be heavy but not [sound] like you’re trying to be 22?”
Actually, I just ran into Reba [Meyers] from Code Orange at the hotel we’re staying at. I worked with them on their last record and co-wrote a couple things with them. And I mean, they’re super fucking heavy — a level of heaviness we couldn’t have even imagined when we were playing in ’94. You can try to be heavy like that, or you can try to find something that’s more sublime and maybe shadowy. I think that’s where we’ve gone on this record. It’s not the heaviness of youthful desperation, because that’s just not where we’re at.
“Sicarus” still has that triplet-swing doom to it, though. Where did that come from?
No idea. But it’s got a little bit of a Sabbath thing in it, which I love.
Howard [Willing], the engineer on the record and my longtime friend and companion, kept saying, “You’ve got to do something with the song.” And I was like, “It’s too weird. I don’t know what the fuck to do with the song. I don’t even know what to sing over this goddamn thing.” I tried to take it off the record five times, but he kept fighting me [on that].
Can you tell us about adding wrestling maneuvers to the Smashing Pumpkins’ live show? What’s it like to have someone throwing down a neckbreaker in the middle of a song?
Well, when we did the video for “Beguiled” a couple years ago, I had some NWA wrestlers appear in the video. My kids were also in the video. [Then] we kind of fell into this idea of [reproducing the] video onstage. If the kids are in the building, they get up and dance like they do in the video. And if the wrestlers happen to be in the building, they get up and continue the storyline of the song.
This only happens during “Beguiled.” The two wrestlers are named Bryan Idol and Natalia Markova, and they both work for the NWA. Every time we do it, it’s like they’re Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. The storyline is always a bit different, but it always ends with Bryan losing.
At Wrigley Field, we did this thing where my kids came out dancing with Natalia… then Bryan comes over and nails Natalia. I think the whole thing ended with my daughter punching Bryan in the nether regions. As Bryan’s selling his nut shot, Natalia sneaks up behind him and gives him what we call a “Cutter” — she grabs him by the neck and pulls him down, and he takes the face bump forward.
Has crafting storylines with the NWA tightened up or altered the way that you look at lyrics and storytelling within Smashing Pumpkins?
There’s very little crossover, in terms of aesthetics or logic. I think the one positive influence that wrestling has had on my musical life is it’s made me look at the narrative arc of a show differently, in terms of how I write the set list.
There’s a flow with how you book a wrestling event. You want to start a little hot, then you want to throw out something a little outside of the box, and then you want to end strong. It’s slightly different than the way [the band] used to play. So, that has had a positive influence. Otherwise, no… never the twain shall meet.
You said something interesting in your Carnyland series about the stakes of staging a wrestling show: “This is either going to be a big success or it’s going to be an absolute mistake.” Is that a maxim you’ve also lived by through your work with the Smashing Pumpkins?
You know… that’s a question I’ve never been asked. How can I tell you the honest version of it? When I make a challenging record, I’m well aware that it’s a challenging record. I’m not making that record to lose, but I also accept that I may not win in that moment. I would like to tell you in a sort of an emo way that it is this kind of desperate, “all or nothing” thing, but that’s not the way I’ve operated. And collectively, we have confidence that over time our musical decisions get borne out.
For example, when Jimmy and I came back in 2007 to put out Zeitgeist, it was very poorly received. Everybody wanted us to make Siamese Dream 2. Instead, we made this very primitive, brutish metallic record about the failure of Western culture. People said the record was way too dark and dystopic, and they didn’t like the vision of America that I was painting.
Well, here we are 17 years later, and I think I was pretty accurate with where we were going collectively. That’s not a political statement. It’s to say that whatever was going on between technocracy and globalism — this idea that there’s going to be this new way of running the world that doesn’t necessarily include national sovereignty the way it used to be — I mean… I pretty much called it.
I got called a conspiracy theorist. Now, it looks pretty tame. I called my shot like Babe Ruth pointed at the center of Wrigley Field and then hit it out of the park. Now people really like the record. They’re constantly asking us to put it back up, because it’s not on streaming services currently.
So yeah, I don’t play to lose… but I don’t necessarily play to win each round in the current culture, either.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.