Billy Corgan on Writing 200 Songs to Find the 12 That Matter
The Smashing Pumpkins frontman on the brutal math of album-making, the myth of inspiration, and why he still records on tape.
You've said you write hundreds of songs for an album and keep a fraction. Why so many?
Because the first fifty are usually the ones I already knew how to write. Somewhere around song sixty or seventy, I get uncomfortable, and that's where the real album starts. If I stopped at twenty, I'd just be repeating myself. The throwaway songs aren't failures — they're the warm-up. They clear the obvious ideas out of the way so the strange ones can surface.
People romanticize inspiration. Where do you actually stand?
Inspiration is for amateurs. Professionals show up and work. I treat it like a job — I'm at the studio by nine, I write until I have something, and some days that something is garbage and I throw it away. But you can't catch the good stuff if you're not already standing in the river. Waiting for the muse to show up is how people end up with three songs and a decade of excuses.
You still track to analog tape. In a digital world, why?
Tape forces commitment. When you can undo anything instantly, you stop making decisions — you just keep options open forever, and the record never gets finished because you're always second-guessing. Tape says: this take is the take. You play it like you mean it, and you move on. The limitations are the whole point. They're what make it sound like a band playing together instead of a thousand puzzle pieces.
What's the through-line across everything you've written?
Longing. Every Pumpkins song, at its core, is about wanting something you can't quite reach — a feeling, a person, a version of yourself that maybe never existed. I think that's why it connects. Everybody's chasing something. I just put mine into guitars.