Music

Billy Corgan has spent over three decades reshaping alternative rock, carving out a legacy as bold and uncompromising as his music.
From the dreamy haze of Siamese Dream to the sprawling ambition of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—a No. 1 Billboard 200 smash—his work plays like a fever-dream diary, each album a restless search for meaning in a world that refuses to stay still.

With The Magnificent Others, The Smashing Pumpkins frontman’s latest foray into long-form storytelling, Corgan channels that same restless curiosity into candid, unfiltered conversations with some of music’s most fascinating figures. Featuring legends like Diane Warren, Gene Simmons, Sharon Osbourne, Tom Morello and Wolfgang Van Halen, the podcast isn’t just a name-drop fest—it’s a deep dive into music’s untold stories.

Explore

See latest videos, charts and news

See latest videos, charts and news

“It’s really not that different from how I am in my personal life,” Corgan tells Billboard. “I’ve been lucky enough through the years to talk to so many well-known and successful people, and so it’s not that different to what I would ask if I was just sitting around a dinner table.”

“Some people take umbrage with the fact that I insert myself or tell stories, but that’s just how I talk,” he continues. “I don’t do this professionally—I didn’t go to school for it. It’s not like I wrote for a fanzine for five years before jumping in. I went straight to the highest level, talking to some of the most famous people in the world.”

Fans have noticed the difference. “My favorite compliment was people writing me saying, ‘I haven’t heard an interview like that for Gene Simmons in 25 years.’”

His approach has led to moments that even surprise him. In a recent episode with Diane Warren, the legendary songwriter revealed that, after writing over 1,500 songs, her process is still entirely instinctual.

“I expected some kind of formula, but she just said, ‘I feel it. I’m looking for that song that makes the hair rise up on your arm,’” Corgan explains “It’s very similar to Rick Rubin—Rick will openly say, ‘I don’t know anything about recording. I only know what I’m attracted to and what makes me feel something.’

“So here are two people at the top of their field who don’t have an intellectual overlay to their work. They trust their instincts, and somehow that translates to the common public in a way that’s more universal than anything I’ve ever done. And that shocks me—like, how do you just roll out of bed and know what the right song is?”

For Corgan, these conversations aren’t just about craft—they’re about legacy. He’s spent his entire career pushing against the weight of his own past, sometimes at great personal cost.

“Celebrity culture basically influences the zeitgeist to the point where if you don’t play along, something’s wrong with you,” he reflects. What followed was a period of exile where he felt stripped of status and dismissed in ways that undermined his accomplishments.

“There was a period where I completely resisted nostalgia, and I was punished for it,” he admits. Punished in a way that was actually very cruel. Not only was I stripped of my celebrity or my status, I was sort of mocked. The best way I could explain it, if you and I were just sitting around a table, is they tried to take away from me the things that I actually did, right? It wasn’t enough that I wrote those songs and didn’t want to play them—it was like, ‘We’re not even sure he wrote those songs.’”

Eventually, he found peace with it. He realized that celebrating his past didn’t mean being trapped by it.

“I found some kind of balance in there, where I can play the songs that people want to hear—and by the way, I wrote them, so it doesn’t hurt me,” he says. “At the same time, I can balance it with new material. And once I found that balance in the last six, seven years, it’s been super positive energy around me, around the band, around the shows. So I feel very good that I made the right decision, because I do want people to have a good time.

“For every person that wants to talk about Siamese Dream, there’s just as many people that want to talk to me about the album that didn’t sell—because the album was good, it just didn’t sell,” he says. “But in the pop world, it’s sell or not sell. Sell or don’t exist. That’s a Faustian bargain.”

The fracturing of musical culture particularly fascinates him. Where The Smashing Pumpkins emerged in an era when alternative rock briefly became the mainstream – with Corgan appearing on magazine covers alongside other alternative figureheads – today’s landscape is infinitely more splintered.

“People use the term ‘digital ghetto,’ and I think what they mean is that things exist in a particular zip code digitally,” he explains. “You could drop a name that all your friends know as the hottest thing in the world, and your five neighbors would be like, ‘Who?’”

He contrasts this with his formative years, when cultural touchstones were truly universal. “I sat at tables in 1986 where grandma was debating Madonna. Because what Madonna did on MTV, everybody saw it. That’s not how it was in the ’80s or the ’90s. Everybody knew Madonna.”

“I don’t know if the pop stars of today, outside of maybe Taylor Swift,” he says, explaining, “Her future will probably look a lot like Madonna’s, in that it will have a very long tail, and they’ll follow her until the end. But for a lot of the rest of them? I don’t think we have any idea what’s going to happen.”

And, of course, there’s Britney. “I think it’s fair to call Britney the prototypical pop siren of the 21st century. Britney set the f—ing new template,” he declares.

For Corgan, his own legacy isn’t just a professional concern—it’s personal. He wants to make sure his children understand his place in the world.

“My son was surprised when I told him not everyone likes my music,” Corgan says, laughing. “I told him, ‘Look, it’s cool. Not everybody likes what Daddy does, but a lot of people do.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, I think you’re the best.’”

“I want my son to understand my perspective of my musical and artistic life, so that when he encounters other people’s opinions of me, he’ll have formed his own version of it,” he explains.

But beyond sentimentality, he’s thinking about the long-term future of his work. “I want to make sure that if anything happens to me, my affairs are put in order in a way that my children cannot only benefit from my hard work but also know what to do with it,” he says.

“There’s at least 100 unreleased songs. And I think I’ve released 350 or so at this point. So understanding that those are valuable things—they have to be protected like works of art.”

At this point in his career, Corgan isn’t chasing approval or trying to rewrite the past. He’s found his balance—honoring the legacy he’s built while continuing to explore what’s next. Shortly after the conversation, he announced A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness, a reimagining of the landmark album as an opera, set to debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Nov. 21.

“People associate me so strongly with the Pumpkins,” he reflects. “It’s hard for them to imagine me apart from it.”