Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan admitted that being a parent changed how he's gone about his career. Corgan and fiancee Chloe Mendel have two children, six-year-old Augustus and four-year-old Philomena.
Corgan spoke candidly about being an artist while raising a family, telling Britain's The Guardian: “When you start having kids, it’s like — OK, now you gotta not repeat all the mistakes that you’ve been complaining about in your songs for 20 years. Now, you got to be that guy that you wished your father was.”
He added, “It has a way of sobering you up. I’ve never had any drug or alcohol issues; it was more like the classic: I guess I better grow the f***up now. I put off adult responsibility about as long as possible, outside of work. It was always my inner rationalization — 'I'm working, and so everything’s fine.' But that turned out not to be the case.”
Corgan went on to say, “I don’t want my kids growing up with a has-been father. I won’t play games: I believe we’re one of the great bands. . . I felt that when we were playing to 50 people in 1988. . . The sense, at this point, is not one of sort of chest-thumping victory. It’s just like: 'No, this is the arc we should have stayed on.' We were the ones who walked away from it; nobody took us off our game. And now we’re back to doing what we’re good at.”
A while back, Billy Corgan told us why he feels presenting Smashing Pumpkins music as part of a traditional album is still important: “Putting our foot down and saying we still believe in the album, which even a few years ago I was thinking was a dead form and maybe in five years it will be a completely dead form, sort of brought the focus that we needed to ask the record business that still is there to focus on us enough to try to bring an audience in to find it.”
On Tuesday night (November 15th) he Smashing Pumpkins / Jane's Addiction: Spirits On Fire tour will hit San Francisco's Chase Center.