TSP Media - Billy Corgan BLOG Post 4/8/04

I want to start by thanking ken for this unique opportunity to share with you some of the process that I go thru to try to bring a particular body of work together...the kind of flotsam that ken has asked me to bring here is the type of information that is often overlooked, and I appreciate having this forum to explore these intimate details publicly...so, with that said, I will ramble on...i am going to assume that if you are reading this, you know a little bit about me, so I will skip my background bio and instead focus on the context of this group of songs which I loosely refer to as "Chicago" songs...(more...)

i am not sure yet whether that will be the title at the end of the day because it sounds sort of bland to me, but it still accurately describes the songs because they all were written with Chicago, my hometown, in mind...the associations are loose, however, as I see the connections as being more spiritually related to the core essence of my city, then say a Broadway show where faces and places are name checked...there is some of that, but for the most part those things only entered the lyrics if they seemed to truly capture the spirit that I was seeking...the origin of coming to write these songs is somewhat haphazard, as I didn't begin this by saying to myself, "right, time to write a bunch of tunes about Chicago!"...actually, it began one innocent evening in 2000 while I was waiting for my girlfriend to get ready to go out to dinner...i had 15 minutes to kill, and I had this book of old folk songs laying around...i flipped it open, and because I can't read music, I started making up my own version of a song from the 1800's...this lead me to eventually create 28 of these types of "imagined" songs over a period of months, and I had a lot of fun writing them...songs about Jesse James and hearses rolling by with broken hearted lovers and the like... out of these 28 there was one song that struck a deep nerve with me personally called "el-a-noy", a folk song from the 1860's about settlers coming into Chicago...because of the personal nature of the lyrics and the lonesome and hopeful quality of this city, it seemed to resonate more deeply within me...somewhere along the way, because of that one connection, I hatched the idea to assemble a whole group of songs that would be linked by the spirit of Chicago, because I think that this town is truly indescribable...it is an odd mix of violence, pioneer recklessness, unbridled capitalism, undying hope, and if you have ever been here during the winter, death and endless rebirth...at the bottom of all of it though, is that I really love this place!!...at the end of last summer (2003) I started what I would call formal recording of these songs, both audio and video, with the hope of making a DVD, and possibly a companion CD as well...my engineer Bjorn and I worked for a total of about 6-8 weeks on around 25-30 songs... I wasn't happy with the total results, which is why I am now giving this whole thing one more chance because I still don't feel I have fully wrestled this material to the ground...starting on Monday (April 12th), we are going to work for 6 days in front of an invited audience (at a former neighborhood church) of friends and fans in the hopes that I can step up and make this work...the final act will then be a show at the Metro in Chicago on April 19th, which we are also filming for the DVD...there is only one problem :) duh-duh-du-dum....I haven't played most of these songs for a very long time because I have been working on my first solo rock album... so, in the next few days, I hope to share with you the challenge of getting reacquainted with the material, some of my hopes, fears, and desires, and oh yeah, my attempt to write one final "Chicago" song at the last second...thanks for reading (and playing along)...all the best bc

Thanks to Christ*Wine for the information.

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