SP INTERVIEWS / ARTICLES


LAUNCH CD INTERVIEW

:INFLUENCES:

Billy-I grew up listening to like a lot of what would be considered like the basic classic rock, the rolling stones, the beatles, cheap trick, boston, everything that you could think of what would be top of you know of rock, I listened to it, deep purple, black sabbath.

D'arcy- I would have to say that all roads lead back to the beatles

:CHICAGO TALES:

D'arcy- I kinda got dumped in chicago with no place to go in 1989 with no money and ah my parents on vacation with no forwarding address. So, I meet billy and james really quickly though. I spent several years doing various odd jobs waitressing. I worked in a motorcycle store. Those were the good old days

James-Uhh One, we were never really part of any hip scene. We weren't very punk rock. Steve Albini (?) didn't like us. blah blah blah. It doesn't really matter cause I don't hang out with guyvall(?????). Guyvall being with the hip part of town.

:90's ROCK:

Billy-I think what we had in the early 90's was a movement to solidify the best of what had come before. Ya know the grunge bands and the seattle bands ,whatever, kinda epitomized everything that was great about rock music with out all the dumb things about dwarfs and elves and stuff. It was more reality but it had the heaviness. What's unfortunate about that is now that it's become popular, ya know, what was assimilated is now being repeated. So now your having a repetition of the assimilation. It's like (?) you initiating something. Your imitating the imitation.

james-It's kinda like you have your Pearl Jams, your Nirvana's. Then Stone Temple Pilots come out. Then everyone says its a rip off that. Then you have rip offs of STP like, I don't know Uhh wha...Silverchair. Then you have underground bands like pavement. Then you get like, bands like weezer which are son of commercial pavement. Then you get bands that are like, you get a rip off thing of weezer like Presidents of the United States of America. It's like where does it stop.

:DUELING GUITARS:

Billy-I think James's style of acoustic guitar is much more defined than his style of electric guitar because often time he's playing off of what I'm writing and because I write so specifically on electric guitar, there's not a lot of room. So uhh It's hard to explain his acoustic style

James-We play amazingly different. He has his own style and I have mine but I guess like concerning like leads or little solos or little drop in bits that we always do throughout the songs. He tends to play a lot faster. He uhh has a lot more uhh I think what they would call uhh vibrato on the string and uhh I'm extremely laid back. I play simpler melodies

:GEEK SPEAK:

Jimmy-I've got a MAC 80180 that I've had soup'd up with uhh a lot of extra memory. Its got 4 gigs of memory and 32 megs of RAM. Uhm I've got a 2088 superfax modem. The computer's a great thing its...alot of people say ohh the computer, the computer, but It's 95. Its a necessary part of life for me right now. I couldn't life with out it.

D'arcy-I think the internet there are some really good things on it but I also see a lot of people like completely wasting there time. Ya know just spending hours and hours and hours gossiping and living vicariously through other people and it's, it's ridiculous. I suppose It's no different from when I was a teenager talking on the phone 3 hours a day. So, I hope kids will grow out of it. I hope its only kids.

:BAND DYNAMICS:

Jimmy-If you, if you look at somebody's life over a 7 year period, you're not, it's not gonna be pretty. It's gonna be life. You know, things happen, people change, people grow up, and one thing they really looked over is that here it is 7 years later and we just made a double record. We just stuck ourselves in the studio for 5 months and here we are. The music is still doing the talking.

Billy-Huh, usually with the band. It happens 2 ways. Huh, There'll be stuff that I spontaneously come up with in practice. Then, we'll immediately kinda go in and start working on it. Then, there's other instances where I'll bring in a demo, usually just music, and huh then I'll just kinda start arranging it with the band. I'll play the demo and say "OK, I kinda wanna do this but I'd like you to do this." So. that's usually how it works with the band. There's other songs that I write completely on my own and the band is never really involved at all in the process. It just gets to wait until we get to the album.

:DOUBLE CD:

Jimmy-Just in our everyday rehearsals we encompass just a wide variety of music. In order to get it all on a CD, it was gonna have to be a double record because when you're The Smashing Pumpkins and you put out a single record there are certain expectations that we put on ourselves and that our fans put on us to uhh deliver the like the best rock, the best slow songs, the best strange songs and with a double CD it gave us an opportunity to spread it out a little.

James-Well, finishing this record was a good thing. It was, It's a pivotal point for the band because uhh you know. We wanted to do this record as a band. We had a lot of problems with the second record. So, making this record was paramount. So, I don't know. Like a month and a half ago, two months ago uhh I walked out of the studio in L.A. and said good-by to flood and then I was like "OK, see you guys later." Walked out, came back in and said "I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S OVER. I CAN'T BELIEVE IT."

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