Billy Corgan Teases Live Mellon Collie Suite; Watch Him Rehearse The Smashing Pumpkins Album’s Title Track

Billy Corgan

Billy Corgan Teases Live Mellon Collie Suite; Watch Him Rehearse The Smashing Pumpkins Album’s Title Track

Billy Corgan

Later this month, Billy Corgan is playing a special semi-acoustic solo show at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, near his Chicago hometown. He’s asked fans to write their dream setlists for the show, while also making plain that he won’t necessarily play all the songs that everyone wants to hear. In a new post on the Smashing Pumpkins website, Corgan says that he’ll play songs from across his career — Pumpkins, Zwan, and solo stuff included. And while he doesn’t want to give away too many details beforehand, there will be a suite of songs from the gargantuan Pumpkins album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. Here’s what he writes:

From my perspective I see the RAVINIA show as an opportunity to define a new musical path that can run quite nicely alongside SP, where one name if you will feeds another so that ALL my songs might be played. Now most who read this blog are sophisticated enough to understand that there isn’t a whole hell of a lot of difference (at this point) between those names. Because, let’s face it, they are signifiers that denote ‘something’; but what? So let’s say BC semi-acoustic means Smashing Pumpkins music plus the music of Zwan and other solo endeavors, whereas SP above the masthead just means heavy, psychedelic, tra la la ++. Yet this does not stop punters and ad men from trying to think up 50,000 ways to ‘remind’ the general public that, yes indeed, I’m the same guy from that cage with the rat, and that yes, I’ll be playing some of those songs you’d expect from The Pumpkins et al; albeit more tenderly.

There’s much more about the show in that post on the Pumpkins website, and he’s also posted video of himself playing the Mellon Collie title track on the piano he used to write it. Here’s that:

You can get tickets to that Ravinia show here.

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