“It’s like an unfinished film”: The album Billy Corgan felt he never properly finished
No artist can claim to have a record set in stone until the thing is fully mastered. A lot goes into making even a decent album sound good, and when looking at how every tune speaks to each other, some of the best records are usually contained in the artist’s head before they turn on the red light in the studio. It’s easy for some songs to fall through the cracks, though, and when looking back on his career, there are many moments Billy Corgan wishes he could have done differently.
When Smashing Pumpkins first started, though, no one had heard anything like what they were doing. Some pieces of their music sounded vaguely commercial on Gish, but there was no way they would get arrested in the same era that was birthing artists like Ratt and Warrant around the same time. Once the alternative revolution kicked in, fans got another look at what that sound could be outside of Seattle.
Despite being adopted by grunge as spiritual cousins, Corgan never exactly fit into that particular mould, either. Some people could see the similarities in records like Siamese Dream and Nirvana’s Nevermind, but no one growing up in the Northwest was ever going to write something as chipper as ‘Today’, even if some of the lyrics were the darkest that anyone had heard on the radio.
But the biggest hurdle for Corgan was about never repeating the same thing, and looking through Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Adore, both of them were going for something completely different. The former may have been his disaffected answer to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but bringing in electronic elements for the latter truly set them apart, almost like they were trying to make their version of a Depeche Mode record.
Corgan still had many musical ideas that he wanted to express, but he felt that the next album, Machina, was a good opportunity for him to officially close up shop with the band. Before he could work on the record with Jimmy Chamberlain returning, D’Arcy Wretsky would leave before production ended, leading to the album having a dark undercurrent before it was even finished.
Looking back, Corgan felt that many pieces of the project never fully came together, saying, “Out of all the records I made, that’s the one where it’s a coin flip as to whether or not it should’ve been finished. I don’t think it was produced to a point of completion, it’s like looking at an unfinished film. But that’s the story of the album, me trying to hold something together that had no more organic reason to hold together other than the name above the door. Until I do the reissue, I can’t work out what the last component is and exorcise the ghost of the record.”
While Machina II also gave fans access to the pieces the band were working on around this time, it does feel like a bit of a hodgepodge of different ideas rather than the fleshed-out album that it was supposed to be. Given that Corgan had plans for revamping the record for its anniversary, fans could get a chance to see what the version of the album looked like in his head when coming back with fresh ears.
As it stands, though, Machina definitely feels like the band’s most fractured release of their initial run before their split in the 2000s. Somewhere within Machina and Machina II is the finished album that Corgan had always envisioned, but it’s also interesting to see the fanbase’s perspective of what tracks they think should have made it onto the final cut.
