At 58, Billy Corgan is filled with gratitude. He is at peace with his stardom and with his past — and that was not always the case.
The two-time GRAMMY winner no longer needs the world's approval and music is not his everything. That's why, these days, the singer/songwriter is filled with more joy and happiness than melancholy and infinite sadness.
When Corgan connected with GRAMMY.com from his suburban Chicago-area home earlier this summer, the artist was talkative, but admitted to fatigue mid-conversation. That's not surprising, considering he had played a two-hour set in Detroit the night before. The show was one of 16 dates on a month-long run playing deep cuts from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Machina/The Machines of God and Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music with a three-piece featuring Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Kiki Wong, drummer Jake Hayden and bassist Kid Tigrrr (Jenna Fournier). And, following the show, with his kids — who are all under the age of 10 — in tow, he drove four hours back home.
Just writing down the celebrations and projects planned this year in the artist's life beyond touring is exhausting. This year marks a pair of milestone anniversaries for the Smashing Pumpkins. First, it's 20 years since the release of Machina/The Machines of God and its companion Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. To celebrate, the Pumpkins have remixed and remastered this pair of companion concept records and are offering — exclusively via Corgan's Madame Zuzu's tea shop — an 80-song box set that features the 48-track Machina, along with 32 bonus tracks of demos, outtakes and live performances. Machina/The Machines of God is also set for a vinyl release on Aug. 22.
The coolest celebration of 2025 is reserved for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which turns 30. This 28-song double-album, which has often been revered as the Smashing Pumpkins' masterpiece, runs the gamut from earworm ballads to pop anthems and sonic-rockers; it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, earned the band their first GRAMMY (and garnered seven nominations total), and sold more than 10 million copies. To commemorate this smash, Chicago's Lyric Opera is staging an operatic interpretation of this beloved record, A Night of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, over seven nights in November.
Beyond the album anniversaries and touring, Corgan juggles family time, serving as president of the National Wrestling Alliance, running Madame Zuzu's tea shop, and hosting his "The Magnificent Others" podcast. Yet, remarkably, for the first time in nearly six decades, he's found a work-life balance.
Ahead of the Smashing Pumpkins "Rock Invasion" European tour that kicks off in Bulgaria at the end of July — followed by their first Asian tour in 13 years — GRAMMY.com spoke with the group's frontman about the past, present and future. From fatherhood and finding more serenity to waxing on the 30th anniversary of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and revealing two dream interviewees for his podcast, as Corgan says, "there is a lot to unpack!"
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
It's always a balance, isn't it, when performing live, between playing deep cuts and the songs that mean the most to you versus the fan favorites?
We're lucky enough to have hit songs for people to hear, so I try to stick with that and be grateful that the band's legacy is strong and growing stronger with time, but I still like to pick my spots. I don't like anyone telling me what to do. I take into consideration what the audiences are after, but at the end of the day it's something Pete Townshend once told me, which is that it's up to you to author the experience.
That is really good advice. I'm sure it took a while to get to that point, though?
Definitely. I'm now at a point where I've made a lot of peace with the past and because of that I'm a lot more comfortable with picking my spots to celebrate. When the Pumpkins go on tour now there is an extreme amount of pressure to play a certain number of songs that people argue are "the classics." I like the opportunity to go past that line.
I've learned over the last 10 to 15 years, it doesn't matter who you're playing for — whether it's 1,000 people or 50,000 people, it's the same across the board. I'm not sure if it's because of the internet culture, but the expectation of playing known songs in the show is persistent no matter what level you're at.
While that great advice from Townshend still rings true, as an artist your audience is your constant companion, not the machinations of the record industry, and imagine that first and foremost it's to these longtime listeners that you are most beholden?
Yes. My band has not always been embraced by the institutional apparatus of the music business, whether it's record labels, industry organizations, or the media. My band and I figured out early on that we needed to plant our roots with the audience and always offer them something above and beyond. We always invested in the thing that we could count on, which is our relationship with the audience and with the music and planting our roots where it mattered the most.
Your late father had a profound influence on your musical journey, correct?
Yes. Part of my musical experience was formed by my father, a gigging musician who played five to six nights a week. He often complained about having to play five 45-minute sets a night, but as a kid who wanted to make music for a living, the idea of playing that much music sounded so romantic.
I understand now what my daddy was saying. My earliest memories are of being in basements listening to bands play. My dad loved soul music like the Chi-Lites and Sly and the Family Stone, so I grew up with all that music on top of listening to rock. Later, I discovered what became known as alternative music — the stuff coming out of the UK like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Japan, the Cure, and other cool bands like Bauhaus.
On social media, the public-facing Billy Corgan appears more approachable, joyful and content compared to the angst-driven, and oft-times angry, Billy of yesteryear. Any explanation for this change?
[Laughs.] I always loved music and I still love music, but I wasn't prepared for what music would do to me in return. To oversimplify, there is the inevitable star journey of "if you go up the elevator, you come back down the elevator at some point." It happened to everybody from Frank Sinatra to Elvis [Presley]. It's not an uncommon experience to go up that elevator, come back down, and then try to figure out how to get yourself back up.
Looking back, I wasn't prepared for all the fame and I didn't know what to do with it. It really took finding a great partner — and now my wife, Chloé — having my own family and creating something outside of music for the first time in my entire life to find balance.
This search for balance goes back to my childhood … trying to find a sense of proportionality in my life where I had something that competed with — and trumped — music for importance. In my thirties and my fourties, all I had was music. If the music wasn't going well, I didn't have anything and I had no one to turn to. And then, if I talked about my problems publicly — and I did sometimes — I would be mocked, criticized and bullied for talking about anything from suicidal ideation to my struggles with the modern music business. Because as a rock star you are supposed to put on a pair of expensive sunglasses and just keep sailing past all of it!
We now know from all the VH1 "Behind the Music" shows and other music biopics that some of the biggest stars of all time struggled. [Mental health] is also much more openly talked about. In the early 2000s, and within the new internet culture of sharing and social media, it was a lot to navigate. When you've sold a lot of records — and made a lot of money for a lot of people in the music business — and then years come when they don't send you Christmas cards anymore, you also have to figure all that stuff out.
I never go to the public and ask for sympathy or understanding. All I can say is this has been my experience. And, to put a cherry on top of it, once I got my life together and found stability in a life that had no stability, then my love of making music returned in full. I thought, I can take risks again. It's not live or die with this next record, or this next song. That's when it got fun again.
Guessing that is why, to those on the outside looking in, you also appear like you are having fun again, on and off the stage?
Yes, observationally, that's what you are seeing now: somebody who's re-embraced who I am in the world and I don't need the world's approval. All I need is the love and admiration of my family and the rest be damned.
I don't even know what the right word is, but I feel cool and comfortable with my musical history, past, present and future. I believe I will be judged fairly at the end of the day and my work will stand for itself. If I go to my grave knowing I've left something for my children that they can build their lives on, that's my main focus.
The Smashing Pumpkins and other groups that came of age during the 1990s and early 2000s had to navigate the end of the record industry — at least from a profitability and investment in artist perspective — and the start of the streaming era, along with the good, the bad and the ugly that it brought. That was not the easiest road to get back up from either, was it?
No. My generation experienced the downturn in the music business at the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s with the rise of internet piracy and the flat-footed response of the music business to this culture change, which looks easy to decode in reverse — and has mostly been solved by streaming services — but there were 10 to 15 years where nobody knew what to do.
And, unlike the Baby Boomer bands that got two big checks, one for their first wave of record sales, and another for selling CDs of their vinyl catalog, we Gen Xers didn't get that second run of checks. We had about 10 years of earnings wiped out and that put a lot of us in really weird positions where we had to go tour more and do things like playing entire albums for anniversary-type shows. The snarky internet press threw out a lot of criticism towards Gen-X bands for selling out and it was like, Hey, man, when you have kids and a mortgage, you gotta work!
Speaking of kids, your son Augustus Juppiter and daughter Philomena Clementine joined you earlier this summer on the "Return to Zero" mini stateside tour. How did you navigate that, without a nanny, as you joked in an Instagram story?
We have a rule that if they're on tour with me — with no nanny, which is a very intense experience —they have to come on stage. They usually come out and dance during one song.
Are your kids fans of your music? What do they listen to?
They have great taste in music and it's interesting what they listen to. Their mother is into music from the 1980s, so in the car my daughter asks for stuff like A Flock of Seagulls. She's 6 years old and she'll ask for an obscure song, not their biggest hit, and she knows all the lyrics. I'll be like, You know that stuff?!
Their mother has a greater influence on them than me. They know my music more from the videos. For them, as kids, they connect with seeing dad, much younger, and acting crazy. They see me as someone who was cool back then! And, of course they know all the songs that people sing along to.
Speaking about songs people sing along to, the Billboard No. 1, 10-million selling double-record Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, that spurned hit singles like "Bullet with Butterfly Wings," "Tonight, Tonight" and "1979" turns 30 this year. Would you consider it your magnum opus?
For me, it was the watershed moment of the band. Everything I'd been pulling for and everything I'd been saying finally clicked — not only publicly, but also privately — where the band really pushed hard together for the first time and we all moved in one direction.
It's one of those things where it's always been a bit bittersweet because you see the results of us all moving in one direction for once — and the results were pretty stellar, and certainly well-received by the public — but it's bittersweet because, in many ways, it was a singular moment.
The band's history is very complicated because I had a lot of trouble in Chicago fighting allies. The greatest compliment I can give my bandmates, the original Smashing Pumpkins band, is somehow I convinced them to trust my musical intuition — to just zig and zag around the musical landscape and not focus on having a singular identity — and they were cool with that.
Mellon Collie was the culmination of that trust, and everything else that went on was a disintegration of our personal relationships — which sounds strange, because we really had musical unity when we didn't have personal unity. That is still very strange to me because I don't know how that even works. Imagine, a band that agrees musically, but doesn't agree in life.
You definitely hear that tightness, musicality and cohesiveness on Mellon Collie.
Yes. You see the results of that band harmony [on that record] and the confidence that came from years and years and years of touring. We did 14 months touring Gish, our first album, then 14 months on Siamese Dream, our second record, where you hear a really road-tested band; then, we got even tighter on Mellon Collie with the addition of Flood and Alan Moulder as producers.
Why did you choose Flood and Moulder as producers for Mellon Collie after working with Butch Vig on your previous two records?
We had worked with Alan on Siamese Dream as mixer and Flood came in for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as somebody we really respected who had produced some amazing records, including working with U2. We trusted him.
He said to me in the beginning of the process, "I'm not interested in the band that everybody wants you to be, I'm interested in the band that I see on stage," which no one had ever said to me before. Everybody was always trying to move us towards this kind of idealized place. To Butch Vigs' credit, on Siamese, he did that, and he did it to great success, but it wasn't really who we were, as people, if that makes any sense. We were a more rough-hewn group collectively. It's like the difference between an airbrushed movie star and a cinéma vérité; Flood wanted the cinéma vérité version of the band.
Having Flood guide Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness influenced the breadth, the depth, and the diversity of the music you recorded for this double record, didn't it?
For sure. We went in a completely different direction with Flood. Butch wanted polish, Flood wanted raw; where Butch wanted clean, in tune and perfectly bright, Flood wanted it murky and shadowy. That encouragement and approach also promoted in me a form of writing that allowed me to go into a deeper place emotionally without worrying about whether or not it would be impressive to somebody at a record label and that just unleashed this torrent of creativity.
It sounds like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and the mid-1990s era of the Smashing Pumpkins was, in many ways, the height of the band's creativity and cohesiveness. Why do you think that was the case?
Jimmy Chamberlin [Smashing Pumpkins' drummer] likes to point out — and I can't say that I totally agree with him, but I think his voice is important in this thought — he believes we also benefited from the culmination of a culture that was celebrating that kind of risk taking that we, in 1995, similar to 1965 in American music with the British Invasion, found ourselves at the right place at the right time where the public en masse was open to something different.
Honestly, if you look at where rock 'n' roll and alternative music currently stands, it's really the first time it's seemed to open back up in a long time for guitar music. Sleep Token, for example, is a band a lot of people are talking about. If you listen to their music, you are seeing again that diversity and that kind of risk-taking, genre-bending, and the willingness to merge styles without having to choose just one particular country to land in.
In November, as part of the 30th anniversary celebrations for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, your hometown opera is hosting the world premiere of a seven-night run of a show you helped produce called "A Night of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness." How did this come about?
We're doing seven performances, an operatic interpretation of Mellon Collie at the Lyric Opera in Chicago, and the show is on its way to be a complete sellout. It's letting that world put its stamp and its voice on my songs, which is very humbling.
I'll be there and I'll be singing some songs with the ensemble, but it really is about giving them the license to do what they are so great at. I'm a big fan of the Lyric here in Chicago, and it's such an important institution. So to help open the doors, bring in young people and people who might never step foot in the building, is a great honor.
Another honor, and one that was a bit of right place, right time, as well, is your new podcast, "The Magnificent Others," that you launched this past February. How did that opportunity arrive?
I appeared on Bill Maher's "Club Random Podcast" and after I did the show, his producers approached me and asked if I was interested in doing my own podcast for the network Bill was building. I said, "Well, I don't know, I just did one recently that did okay, but nobody really cared." And, they said, "We think you can really do this, so why don't you think it through and tell us what kind of show you'd want to do?"
I came back and told them I wanted to have more of a PBS-style conversation with artists I admire. I explained that I felt like there is a lot of celebration in American culture of people without what I would call "accomplishment"; yet, maybe they're in the zeitgeist, but they're not being celebrated as people. I think a lot of people are being overlooked that have had tremendous contributions.
They said, "Okay, make us a list of potential guests." That initial list included everyone from Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons to Larry Graham Jr. of Sly and the Family Stone — people who, unless you are a musician, or you really understand the way musical culture works, you may not really know to "give them their flowers," to use the modern term. It's the difference oftentimes between the way musicians see music and the way the public sees music.
I wanted to bring that musician's perspective and thought there was room to have these sober, slow-language conversations that really explore what it's like to be a celebrity. For example, I just did a two-part interview with Paul Stanley. Paul, of course, has been interviewed 10,000 times. He knows exactly how to evade questions. He knows what he needs to say and he knows what he needs not to say. So, it takes a certain skill — and I'm not saying I'm great at it — but it takes a certain skill to talk about things that have been well-covered, but then bring to it a new perspective.
That's where I have an advantage, because I know what it's like to stand on stage in front of 50,000 people. I know what it's like to have a dream for your band and have everyone think there's no way you can do it and then you pull it off, and what that feels like. I'm in rare company, at least in terms of experience, and once the artists know that I'm not there to create clickbait — that I really want to have a deep conversation about their experience and occasionally share some of mine — they are more open and it's been wildly successful.
Do you have any dream guests you hope to land in the future on "The Magnificent Others?"
Paul McCartney. My elevator pitch on it is, it's similar to what I was saying about Paul Stanley. As a musician, McCartney has been interviewed probably more than any person on the planet, including that great series he did with Rick Rubin where they put up the multitracks and listened together. But I still feel — and I'm a huge Beatles fan, like many people are — but I still feel I don't really know Paul McCartney the person, which is strange, and that's probably deliberate.
Not to cast any shade on Mr. McCartney, but I don't know what it's like to be Paul McCartney. I can't even imagine what it's like to be on that level of fame for that long and to be that successful and be so influential on the culture. There is the songwriter Paul, the performer Paul, and then there's the human being part of all of that, and I feel for somebody who's been that influential in 20th and 21st century culture. We don't really have as much information as we should. We have more information on Picasso and Dali than we have on Paul McCartney and that's criminal.
I would love to sit across from Paul and just talk about it from a different perspective and see if we shine a little light on this incredible artist … stuff like that animates me.
The second dream guest would be Ritchie Blackmore, who is one of the greatest guitar players of all time. He single-handedly created what most people call hard rock … he figured that out way before most people did. To me, that would be a dream interview, because he, like a lot of great artists, is reluctant to talk because he's been burned by the press too many times and people ask all the stupid questions. He should really be approached like a great master of art and not somebody with just some more stories to share.
Any final thoughts on what's next and what the rest of 2025 has in store for you, personally, and the Pumpkins?
Yes, it's been quite the talk and I'm having quite the year: everything from a solo tour of deep cuts to heading to Europe and playing Ozzy [Osbourne] and Black Sabbath's final show. Then, the Pumpkins are going to Asia for the first time in 13 years, so, it's a wild year.
On a personal note, I last saw the Smashing Pumpkins perform in 1994 at Lollapalooza in Pittsburgh.
Lots has changed since then. I learned how to sing more than scream and we actually play songs at a reasonable tempo … it's all finally coming together.