It can be hard to find something that lifts your spirits up during a global pandemic. For rock-music fans daydreaming of times when live music was an option in our daily lives, a dystopian-themed, futuristic sci-fi double album from the Smashing Pumpkins really is good news for people who love good news. Cyr was released at the end of November, but an even sweeter announcement came a month prior, on the 25th anniversary of the 1995 masterpiece Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, when the band announced that a 33-song sequel was in the works, to finally complete the intended trilogy sequence of Mellon Collie and Machina.
Pumpkins’ maestro and principal songwriter Billy Corgan, a man notoriously known for his ambition, is doubling and tripling down on his prolific nature and is downright ferocious with creating as much art as is humanly possible in 2020. “I’ve been writing a book for years,” Corgan says when he pops up on Zoom for this interview, hurriedly eating a snack. “I get up early and write the book, and I just literally finished writing, so I’m trying to scramble.”
Besides that book, right now he’s also composing several intricate conceptual albums (a follow-up to Cyr is “about three-fourths done,” Corgan says), he owns the National Wrestling Alliance, and he just opened Madame ZuZu’s, a plant-based teashop and art studio in Chicago, with his wife, Chloe Mendel. (They also have two small children.) He recently collaborated with Carstens Amplification on a signature amp, called Grace, which he helped design. And he broke the news to PG that there’s another Reverend signature guitar in the works. The prototype is pictured on our cover and in this article (above).
The Smashing Pumpkins original lineup of Corgan, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, guitarist James Iha, and bassist D’arcy Wretzky mirrors the hybrid nature and push and pull of the group’s most celebrated work, Mellon Collie. Highs and lows of internal struggle and interrelationships are silver-lined with romantic, epic frolics in the light, yet marred by sorrowful valleys and conflict. At the height of their success in the ’90s grunge era—starting for the band with the 1991 debut Gish, building with Siamese Dream’s breakthrough wall-of-guitar sound in 1993 (that inspired generations of guitarists to seek that one-of-a-kind fuzz tone), to Mellon Collie, the album that blasted them into the top echelons of rock ’n’ roll history—the Smashing Pumpkins became one of the biggest groups in the world. After disbanding in 2000, Corgan formed Zwan, pursued solo works, and ultimately continued making music under the Pumpkins umbrella with a rotating cast. Guitarist Jeff Schroeder came into the fold in 2007 and remains a permanent member of the group today.
In 2018, James Iha rejoined the Pumpkins’ on tour for some live shows in L.A. and Chicago, and, not long after, he officially rejoined the band. With three out of four original Pumpkins’ reunited, they teamed up with Rick Rubin to make an eight-song LP called Shiny Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. Those sessions served as a prelude to now, which is ramping up to be one of the most productive periods for the Smashing Pumpkins in more than two decades. Cyr is the first time original members Corgan, Iha, and Chamberlin have created a conceptual album together since 2000’s Machina.
The Pumpkins are a different band today, with three bona fide guitarists in Corgan, Iha, and Schroeder. (Iha could not take part in this interview, due to a travel conflict.) Corgan calls Cyr—which he wrote and produced entirely by himself—a new way forward. He says the tradition has always been: “Stick our foot in something new and see what comes out.” This time, Corgan worked primarily in Pro Tools and played heavily with layering synths and remixing Chamberlin’s drums. To say that Cyr is more of an electronic record is not to say that the arrangements are any simpler. The album’s musical range is wide and unpredictable, incorporating elements of prog, and, well, most genres really, with heavy bass synths, lush layering, and, of course, a few extremely aggressive metal-guitar nods.
The band always had one foot in the past and one foot forward, but today Corgan seems to be standing in the now, with a goal to make music that reflects the rare time we’re all witnessing. Cyr’s release date was delayed multiple times because of the uncertainty of COVID-19, but Corgan was adamant that it be released in 2020. “It’s kind of a blurry,” Corgan says with a laugh. “My one mantra was, it’s all gotta come out this year. I’m not waiting. Please don’t make me go through Christmas, like I just gotta get this thing out of my life, like move on, next page, put the album out. It’s just music, no one will die. Everything’s fine.”
After all, he’s got other things to do, and next up is finishing the sequel to Mellon Collie, which means, we’ll find out what happens to the Zero character. Corgan had this to say about it.
“There’s some interesting messaging in the usage of those characters and how it’s played out over time,” he shares. “If I was being a bit glib about it, I would say that at the dawn of the internet age, circa ’95, whether I realized it or not, I started dealing with the dissociative effect of the coming culture. Unfortunately, over the last 25 years we’ve gotten more and more dissociative as individual people and as a culture and as groups, and we’re falling more into factions. We’re less unified by common ideas. So on one hand you have the rise of the super individual, the brand, the avatar, but you also have the falling away of old institutional thinking about how groups can be peacefully together. It’s very much the stuff of cyber-punk novels and dystopic sci-fi movies and stuff like that. So, in a weird way, this character launched me into a set of ideas that I may not have explored otherwise, including my grappling with my own self through the prism of fame or whatever. So it feels right to me to try to finish the story. If we started here, now we’re here. How does the story end? I talked to the band about it and everyone was interested in the idea so, we’re off.”
Pretty deep stuff, even after a year like 2020. And sonically?
“It’s pretty out there,” Corgan says. “It’s as heavy as anything we’ve ever done and it’s as out there as anything we’ve ever done [laughs].”
Until then, there’s a new experimental Smashing Pumpkins’ double album to digest. Read on as Corgan and Schroeder take us through the making of Cyr.
When talking about Cyr, you use the word “dystopic” a lot. That’s a fitting theme for these times.
Billy Corgan: That’s my new favorite word.
TIDBIT: The Smashing Pumpkins' 11th studio album, Cyr, was written and produced entirely by Billy Corgan. The companion animated series, In Ashes, features five songs from the 20-song double album.
How was the songwriting process different or the same with Cyr as compared with past Smashing Pumpkins albums like Mellon Collie?
Corgan: Well, I think the beginning is always the same—it’s like a riff, a motif, a chord change or something like that. The difference now is, over the past two years I’ve learned how to produce records in a more modern way, and so I had to let go of the way I’d always produced records before. I had made kinda modernish records but I ran them through the prism of the way I would normally do stuff. So TheFutureEmbrace, my first solo record, was electronic-ish but it was still made in the same way I would’ve made a Smashing Pumpkins record in terms of process. But now with everyone using technology I had to … it’s a very different process by which to work.
Jeff Schroeder: I think maybe sonically it is a bit of a departure. There’s a lot of synths, and even if there are guitars they kinda sound like synths sometimes so it’s hard to tell. So, in that way, it is a departure, but from my experience of working with the band as a recording entity, which basically goes back to the Teargarden project and Oceania, the studio process is relatively the same in that it’s a very slow, meticulous way of engagement. It’s not a very “off the cuff” band. It’s very thought-out; the aesthetic choices are very strategized. It’s just more the culmination of discussions that we had over time about where we saw new material going. The way that I understood what we were trying to do is that anything that felt like the older-style material—which maybe we did with the Rick Rubin album, if he wanted to indulge in some of that we were more than happy to. But on Cyr, we were very much like, even if that’s a good idea, if it feels like an older-style song let’s put it aside and look for things that feel fresh and new.
Billy, you write songs on piano and acoustic guitar. For Cyr, was that a pretty even toss, or did you favor writing on one more than the other?
Corgan: To me, it’s just always about a germ of an idea that I believe in. I always believe that a good idea can be jumped up and down on. It needs to be tested. In the old days, we would get in the rehearsal space and play a riff for an hour or something like that, and it was sort of testing your interest and curiosity and whether it was sort of inspired. Something emotional or romantic. So this is just different, but it’s also the same: a melody in the shower, a dream. I’m whore-ish when it comes to ideas [laughs]. I’ll take ’em as long as I like them.
How did the idea for this year’s In Ashes five-part animated series come about? How did you select the five out of Cyr’s 20 tracks for the series?
Corgan: Because of COVID, we were concerned we weren’t going to be able to make any videos in the traditional sense. So this idea was hatched about animation, that seemed more fun. We talked about maybe releasing five songs before the album. It felt right to me, because of the different nature of Cyr, if I gave people a chance to hear the music—that they familiarize themselves with it as opposed to having kind of a gut reaction of hearing all 20 [songs] at one time. I’ve had way too many experiences where people overreact to an album on first listen. Some of my most favorited albums now are ones that people had a completely negative reaction to the first time they heard it.
As part of the Smashing Pumpkins from the start, James Iha originally was a Fender guy in the Gish-era of the band, but slowly made his way to humbuckers and Gibsons. Here is a 1984 Gibson Les Paul Custom he’s had since the mid-’90s. The only thing he’s done to the guitar was swap in Tom Anderson H3 (bridge) and H1 (neck) humbuckers to match the sound Billy achieved on APC’s recordings. Following suit even further, Iha tunes this LP to C# and uses a custom set of Ernie Ball Slinkys (.056–.044–.032–.020P–.017–.012) that Billy came up with. He prefers to play with Jim Dunlop Tortex .73 mm picks.
This ’80s silverburst Gibson Les Paul has a capo on the first fret and gets put to work for the song “Passive” off of Emotive.
Here is a Yamaha Revstar that uses a capo on the second fret for the cover of Nick Lowe’s “(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding.”
Eschewing any sort of tube amp, Iha relies on the Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II for all his amp simulations and various effects. He goes with in-ear monitors and has monitors or speaker cabs onstage. For his main rhythm setting, he selects a Friedman-style preset.
Back for his second Rig Rundown is bassist Matt McJunkins (check out our Eagles of Death Metal episode where Matt shows off some different gear.) who is still favoring Fender P basses. During his time in EODM, he rolled with a 2010 Fender American Deluxe Precision bass, but he recent upgraded to a new go-to—a 2017 Fender American Elite P. He rocks Ernie Ball Power Slinkys .055–.110 and Jim Dunlop Tortex .88 mm picks.
The core of McJunkins’ APC tone starts with the Mesa/Boogie 400+ that goes into the “Fridge”—an Ampeg 8x10 cab.
For additional tube-tone tweaking, McJunkins incorporates a Demeter Tube Bass Pre-Amplifier and all of his effects patches are coming from the Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II. Onstage, he controls everything with a Voodoo Lab Ground Control.
This is Billy Howerdel’s main squeeze—a 1960 Gibson Les Paul Classic Reissue that is actually two guitars he put together from his days as Trent Reznor’s tech for Nine Inch Nails. The guitar has been upgraded with Tom Anderson H3 (bridge) and H1 (neck) humbuckers, is tuned to C#, and has a custom set of Ernie Ball Slinkys (.056–.044–.032–.020P–.017–.012). All of his guitars, including this beast, has an added cap so when he rolls off the volume he doesn’t lose any of the guitar’s tone. In 2013, Billy spoke with PG about this special guitar, so we’ll let him take it away: “I was the guitar tech on a Nine Inch Nails tour and one of the guitars that lasted the longest—a cinnaburst 1960 reissue Les Paul—is my main guitar now. It got broken all of the time—all the guitars did. They had headstocks off, necks off, just shattered. I fixed this one so many times, and then one day it got thrown into the crowd and somebody in the audience ripped the headstock off. It was sitting headless for a while. I had trunks and trunks of guitars, probably 50 or 60 of them that I traveled with and tried to fix to get ready for a show today, tomorrow, two weeks from now. A similar cinnaburst guitar got broken, and I kept that headstock and tried to marry the two. It got put back on, but at sort of the wrong angle—because, of course, the wood type didn’t match. It’s a little less angled than normal, but it’s the best-sounding and best-playing guitar I’ve ever used. It was a happy accident. I talked with Gibson several years ago about doing a signature model with the same specs. Even if it’s not for mass production, I just want some duplicates in case something ever happens to it.”
Here you can see the break of the original headstock and how the repaired headstock has a minimal break angle.
His second favorite guitar from the NIN days is this Les Paul Studio he prefers for slide work on “Blue” and half of “Outsider.” It also has been outfitted with Tom Anderson H3 (bridge) and H1 (neck) humbuckers and uses a custom tuning: B#-F#-B-B-B-B. He uses the Jim Dunlop 234 glass slide and always jams with Tortex 1.0 mm picks.
Look at the Studio’s gruesome neck joint!
Billy’s fundamental sound starts with this Dave Friedman-modded 1978 100-watt Marshall Super Lead. Friedman reworked the preamp section to sound and react similarly to a 60-watt Naylor head that Billy loved. To help reduce unwanted noises and annoying buzzing, Billy started using Custom Audio Electronics isolation transformers.
The backside of Billy’s coveted ’78.
Depending on what the song needs, how the rooms sounds, and what is working on any given day, Billy will kick on either one of these Gibson GA-15RV 1x12 Goldtone combos that he also uses for his other band, Ashes Divide. Currently, the one on the bottom is the favored combo, which was actually uses parts and was built in the U.K. whereas the top combo was constructed with American components and assembled in the U.S.
To accomplish all the soundscapes A Perfect Circle implements (and reduces headaches and anxiety), Howerdel leans on a Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II. Thankfully, tech Steven Alexander broke down the complicated signal path… keep up!
Guitar > Whirlwind Selector A/B box > Radial Engineering JDI (as a splitter to record a dry signal) > Axe-FX II rear input 1 (we found the rear to have a better signal for Billy’s rig than the front)
Axe-FX II output 1 > CAE splitter input 1
Axe-FX II output 2 > RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo input (non-buffered)
Axe-FX II input 2 < CAE splitter send 1
CAE output 2 > Palmer “The Junction” guitar DI box (for FOH and recording)
CAE Send 2 > DigiTech GSP2101 input
DigiTech GSP2101 output > CAE splitter input 2
Billy Howerdel custom amp send > RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo return 1
Billy Howerdel custom amp return < CAE splitter output 1
Billy Howerdel custom amp input < CAE ISO transformer < RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo send 1
RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo send 2 > CAE ISO transformer > Gibson combo input
Gibson combo (modded) output > RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo return 2
RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo (click stop) output > CAE splitter input
Out front, Howerdel takes the sonic reins thanks to a pair of Mission Engineering SP1-RJM expression pedals and a RJM Music Mastermind GT controller.
And because he loves to have stage volume and feel the air, everything goes through this Marshall AV 4x12 cabinet loaded with G12 Vintage speakers.
Such bluntness may seem at odds with the usual music business spin, but Howerdel has always been wary of showbiz shtick. “I don't have that drive and sales gene in me at all,” he admits. “I’d probably talk you out of the band rather than into it. It’s funny, because I do the majority of press for the band, so go figure.”
The introverted Howerdel entered the music business as a guitar tech, working with the likes of Guns N’ Roses, Smashing Pumpkins, and Tool. “I wanted to be in a band but was too shy to put one together,” he says. “With my personality, it was a way of entering the music business through the backdoor. I wasn’t in it for girls or drugs or any of the things that a lot of people get caught up in rock ’n’ roll for. It was truly for the music.”
On the road, Howerdel would set up his portable studio after the rest of the crew was asleep, writing and recording in hotel rooms and on the bus. He saved money and moved to L.A., where fate intervened. “I wasn’t good at networking, but I just happened to move in with Maynard,” he recalls. After hearing the songs through the bedroom walls, Keenan offered to collaborate, and A Perfect Circle was born. Howerdel financed the first APC record with $20,000 he’d saved.
Another key connection occurred when APC recruited former Smashing Pumpkin James Iha to replace guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, who had joined Queens of the Stone Age. Iha served with the band until their 2004 hiatus, and he returns in the current lineup.
What made you guys decide to regroup?
Billy Howerdel: Maynard just had a hole in his schedule. He had some ideas up his sleeve of doing this all-encompassing tour of select Western U.S. cities, performing the first three albums on three different nights.
James Iha: Billy and Maynard are both busy guys. It’s just a matter of them freeing up enough time to record or do a tour. By 2008 or 2009, enough time had gone by that they both felt motivated to put the band back together and see what it sounded like.
What was it like revisiting the music after so long?
Howerdel: I’m trying not to have demo ears—where you can only hear the original [versions of the songs] and never move past it—but, looking back, I don’t have any regrets. I’ve always had the time to do what I wanted to do to the songs. You never really know what you could redo. You can keep changing things forever—but not necessarily for the better.
Was it hard to relearn the material after being away from it for so many years?
Iha: Yeah, some of the playing is challenging. You can’t really write it down—you have to just memorize it and know it.
Are you playing the original parts live or coming up with new ones?
Iha: Mostly staying true to the record. eMOTIVe was never played live—it was more of a studio record than the first two—so we definitely took liberties with that when we played it live. There’s a lot of shit going on, so it’s like, “What are the best parts to choose for a live performance?”
Howerdel: We spent a lot of time and energy figuring out how these things would come off live. So we had to redo it the way we probably would have recorded it in the first place if we’d thought we were going to tour with it.
Howerdel playing piano during APC's show at the Showbox at the Market in Seattle, WA, on November 12th, 2010. Photo by Jenny Jimenez
How did you go about writing the new song, “By and Down”?
Howerdel: I was in my studio with my 3-year-old son. I plucked around on the keyboard with him and made up some funny songs. As he was pounding on the low keys with his fist, I just came up with the riff for “By and Down.” I thought, “This sounds interesting.” I recorded it on my phone, and then put him in front of the TV or something so I could start working on the song right away.
Iha: We played it for a long time before it got recorded. That almost never happens in APC.
Did road-testing it lead to changes for the studio recording?
Howerdel: The feel of the breakdown drum part got a little dynamic’d up, but that’s really it. It’s nice to know that our instincts were pretty close to what the final song became.
What is the usual APC writing process?
Howerdel: I write the music and Maynard does the lyrics and the melodies.
James, are you involved in writing?
Iha: I haven’t been. When the band first called me, the second record was already done. I played on eMOTIVe, the record after that, but that’s been it.
APC’s music is quite involved—it can’t be easy to fit melodies over it. Does Maynard have any difficulty working with your music?
Billy Howerdel's Gear
Guitars
Gibson 1960 Les Paul Classic reissue
Amps and Cabinets
Dave Friedman-modded 1978 100-watt Marshall Super Lead
Marshall 1960AV 4x12 with Celestion Vintage 30s
Marshall 1960AV 4x12 with 25-watt Celestion Greenbacks
Effects
Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II
Strings and Picks
Ernie Ball strings (.013, .017, .020P, .032, .044, .056), Dunlop 1.0 mm picks, Mogami cables
James Iha's Gear
Guitars
Late-’80s/early-’90s Gibson Les Paul Custom
Early-’80s “grayburst” Gibson Les Paul Custom
Amps and Cabinets
Matrix GT1000FX power amp
VHT 4x12 cab with 25-watt Celestion Greenbacks
Effects
Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II
Strings and Picks
Ernie Ball strings (.013, .017, .020P, .032, .044, .056), Dunlop 1.0 mm picks, Mogami cables
Billy, you also have another project—Ashes Divide—and James, you recently released another solo album, Look to the Sky. Are you guys totally invested in APC?
Howerdel: I’m totally invested in both. The way you have to approach things being a singer in a band, and the way you have to approach them as guitar player/songwriter, are very different. It’s much easier with APC in a way. What it takes physically to be a singer is not to be underestimated. It takes every single calorie you have to burn to put on a performance if you’re doing more intense music. When I’m singing with Ashes, I have nothing left. I’m completely spent.
Can you give us a rundown of your gear?
Iha: Oh god, I’m terrible at this shit.
Howerdel: I was the guitar tech on a Nine Inch Nails tour and one of the guitars that lasted the longest—a cinnaburst 1960 reissue Les Paul—is my main guitar now. It got broken all of the time—all the guitars did. They had headstocks off, necks off, just shattered. I fixed this one so many times, and then one day it got thrown into the crowd and somebody in the audience ripped the headstock off. It was sitting headless for a while. I had trunks and trunks of guitars, probably 50 or 60 of them that I traveled with and tried to fix to get ready for a show today, tomorrow, two weeks from now. A similar cinnaburst guitar got broken, and I kept that headstock and tried to marry the two. It got put back on, but at sort of the wrong angle—because, of course, the wood type didn’t match. It’s a little less angled than normal, but it’s the best-sounding and best-playing guitar I’ve ever used. It was a happy accident. I talked with Gibson several years ago about doing a signature model with the same specs. Even if it’s not for mass production, I just want some duplicates in case something ever happens to it.
Iha: My gear is similar to Billy’s. I play Gibson Les Paul Customs. We changed out the pickups, but I don’t remember the name of the pickups. I’m into gear, but at the same time, I’m not into gear. [Ed. note: According to APC’s techs, both guitarists use Tom Anderson pickups.]
Did you update your rig for the album tours?
Iha: We started using new effects. We’re both using Fractal Axe-FX IIs. We wanted to get some of the original sounds back, but also see if we could make things bigger, crazier, or more exaggerated than the original effects.
Howerdel: I turned on my rig with all the patches for APC, and it just didn’t work. Even in 2004, my stuff was kind of old and not working correctly. So I just scrapped it all and started from scratch. I’ve got my Fractal, but I also kept an older box that’s barely working: the Lexicon MPX G2. I still haven’t heard anything that sounds quite as good, but it’s just so unreliable.
Howerdel leaving it out all onstage during A Perfect Circle's show at the Showbox at the Market in Seattle, WA, on November 12th, 2010. Photo by Jenny Jimenez
Was it time-consuming to program the Fractal units?
Howerdel: Trying to make all of the guitar sounds for 40 songs was just crazy. The APC sounds are really complex. Between what I’m trigerring in MIDI and how controllers work, it took a lot of time—and then I had to redo it again when the new Fractal came out! [Laughs.]
Iha: Yeah, it’s kind of ridiculous, but that’s what happens when you try to get nuanced things that don’t sound like they’re straight out of the box. You really have to sit there with an amp, a laptop, and your guitar, and just tweak shit for a really long time.
Do you have a backup in case the Fractals go down?
Howerdel: There’s a backup unit right under it—just switch the cables and go. It would be back up and running in seconds.
Billy, has your experience as a tech changed the way you look at gear. For instance, is reliability as important as tone?
Howerdel: I definitely worry about the reliability factor. It comes down to budget also. Like, do you want to have an 18-space rack full of unique things? What if it goes down? My rack used to have 130 connections. Now it has five, and there’s very little compromise, if any. The new Fractal is really great, and it does most everything. The thing it doesn’t do so well is feedback. I do a lot of feedback stuff with APC, where I stand in certain spots to get the guitar to squeal. It’s tough to get the power amp to react that way.
YouTube It
“Weak and Powerless,” from APC’s second release, Thirteenth Step, was the band’s highest-charting single. Before embarking on their comeback tour, APC performed the hit on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Do you also use the Fractals for amp modeling?
Howerdel: The Fractal is mostly just for effects. I use the same Marshall amp I’ve always had, a 1978 Super Lead 100 with a modified preamp by Dave Friedman. I came to him with this other amp that I liked the sound of, and we used that as the preamp. I have started using the Fractal for clean sounds, though. I liked the clean sound on the Marshall, but it was definitely hard to tailor, so I just wound up using the Fractal’s Fender clean sounds. There’s one amp I can't get it to simulate: my Gibson. That thing is really cool. I’ve found other cool sounds in the Fractal, but that amp is just like a pirate’s guitar sound. It's the most aggressive thing. I mostly use that for Ashes Divide.
Billy, what effect are you using on that intervallic figure in the verse of “Hollow”?
Howerdel: The effect on that arpeggio thing? It was GRM Tools, a TDM plug-in for Pro Tools. I recorded it with four different settings and put them all together in four different passes. That riff evolves over time. Trying to duplicate that live has always been tricky. I used a bunch of things in the Fractal to simulate it. There’s a filter I’m sweeping, a ring mod, and a delay with an Octavia pedal in front.
Billy, was it hard make the transition from tech to performer?
Howerdel: We all have dreams, and we go for them. But you have to be realistic, too. If it doesn’t work, then you’ve got to have plan B. Plan B for me was being a tech. I really enjoyed it. I made a good living. I liked being around the circus of music. If having a band hadn’t worked out, I probably would have been happy. But in hindsight, if I could go back to age 19 again, I would go right into being in a band.