“Connecting on some level”: The song Billy Corgan thought was written for him
There’s a certain piece of magic that comes with writing any piece of music. There’s no chance that any songwriter can know what their tunes mean to every fan that listens to them, but it takes a special kind of talent to write something so visceral that millions of people around the world can find a piece of themselves in those few lines on a page that end on a record. While Billy Corgan has always kept many parts of his music close to the chest, he couldn’t deny that when music hit him on a deeper level than a simply catchy tune.
When looking at Corgan’s rise to fame, though, he was a bit of an enigma. Despite being one of the leading voices in alternative music in the middle of the grunge movement, he was far from the most authentic grunge rocker. He was not anywhere near Seattle when making his first records in Chicago, but Gish does have its fair share of heavy moments, and it wasn’t that big of a jump to get people who loved ‘Come As You Are’ and ‘Evenflow’ to listen to a song like ‘Cherub Rock’.
By most alternative rock standards, though, Corgan was the technician among the singer-songwriters of his day. Kurt Cobain had talked about making music from the heart and claimed not to know the first thing about proper songwriting, but the minute that Corgan arrived on the scene, he was orchestrating his records in a much different way. If Nevermind was looked at as a punk record, Siamese Dream would have been the 1990s answer to stadium-rockers like Boston or REO Speedwagon, only with lyrics that were much darker like on ‘Disarm’.
It’s not like Corgan was the only one getting darker with his lyrics, either. No one was exactly making the same lyric sheet as a band like Slayer, but they knew it was important not to sing about the typical sex, drugs and rock and roll that everyone on MTV was doing. It was time for everyone to start thinking for themselves, and Rush had been flying that flag ever since they started.
The Canadian icons had begun entering their dad-rock phase at the start of the 1990s, but Corgan was always respectful to the different twists and turns in their glory days. Dave Grohl was an outspoken fan of Neil Peart’s drumming, but when it came to how the drummer wrote lyrics, Corgan felt that ‘Entre Nous’ took everything he was feeling and put it into a tight pop-rock song.
Compared to everything else on the radio then, Corgan finally felt like his voice was being recognised, saying, “I have this memory of being in the basement with my mother. I said, ‘I wanna play you a song.’ And I played ‘Entre Nous’ and I gave her the lyric sheet because I wanted to her to see that this song was connecting with me on some level. I wasn’t as emotionally open. I was very withdrawn. Something about that song allowed me to say, ‘Somehow this song is almost like it’s written for me.’”
And looking at the more fantastical side of Rush’s career, this is one of the first times that Peart found time to be open with his lyrics. Not many people were devoting time to listen to the entire backstory behind the ‘Cygnus X-1’ suite or care about a massive battle between ‘By Tor and the Snow Dog’, but hearing someone honestly talk about the loss of connection they have with someone is something that we all go through.
If anything, this was Peart capitalising on the kind of empathetic ideas that Roger Waters had hinted at with Pink Floyd. He knew that not everyone would be able to see inside his head, but if he could find a way to relate with someone through his lyrics, that was more than enough for him.
