‘My Love Is Winter’: The Smashing Pumpkins song the band were warned not to fuck up
Every musician who has ever taken their craft seriously has been somewhat of a perfectionist. Even if everyone plays with their own distinctive sense of rhythm and feel, there is always that subtle difference in the way they play that’s different from how the songwriter hears the tune in their head. But even if a songwriter like Billy Corgan has the final say in Smashing Pumpkins, it can get a bit more complicated when fans start throwing their hats into the ring.
Because, really, getting the opinion of fans can be a bit of a mixed bag for any famous musician. It makes the most sense to give the people what they want, but if all they ask for is the same tune over and over again, there comes a point where someone starts getting pissed about staying in the same spot for too long. Fans don’t know what they want until you give it to them, and that has always been the way Corgan has operated.
Even though he has had tunnel vision throughout most of the Pumpkins’ best records, it’s easy to see Corgan going from extremely enthusiastic to a dictator way too quickly. Seeing him pushing the rest of the band into the background when working on something like Siamese Dream felt like watching him make a solo album with hired guns, and when the original lineup started to pick up the pieces, it was clear that Corgan was still calling the shots.
When Corgan started working on the Oceania project, though, he had already begun road-testing the songs that he wanted to play. Albums like Zeitgeist were the closest thing to classic Smashing Pumpkins that the band had done since the mid-1990s, but this was designed to be a more trippy adventure, which meant ‘My Love Is Winter’ going through a bunch of reincarnations.
Listening to the song by itself, the whole thing works as a beautiful ballad that is not all that dissimilar from the slower tunes of their early years. The mark of any good song is being able to play it on a single piano or guitar and have it still work, and even if Corgan were playing an unplugged session, this would have had the same kind of punch that ‘Disarm’ had back in the day. The fans couldn’t get enough of it when they played it live, but when has Corgan ever done anything by the book?
Despite being told to keep the studio version faithful to the original, Corgan thought it felt better to take it in a more ethereal direction, saying, “We actually played it live as a ballad, and it went over great. People loved the song. When they found out we were recording it, they wrote on my Twitter, ‘Don’t fuck it up!’ But we just felt there wasn’t as much potential in it as a ballad. It had what we call a ‘shoegazer’ vibe, like the band Ride or something.”
Some fans may have been pissed, but this shouldn’t have been anything new for the band. The whole point behind their old songs was to create something a bit more heavenly than the rest of the grunge scene, so this was the kind of borderline-psychedelic song that was born out of tracks like ‘Mayonaise’, only this time with even more effects and Corgan singing from what sounds like another plane of existence.
It’s easy for anyone to be disappointed when a band undergoes change, but ‘My Love Is Winter’ is the perfect example of that kind of innovation done correctly. Not everything Corgan made is meant to be enjoyed by every single one of his fans, but it was always better for him to make something he wanted to hear rather than satisfy the fans who wanted ‘Today Pt 2: Tomorrow’ or ‘1980’.
