Faith and Foundation From Pumpkin's Billy Corgan
MACHINA / the machines of God
"It's as radical and as important as Braque and Picasso like doing cubist, you know drawings".
Let's go back to the end of Adore....How soon after promoting that album did you begin writing songs for MACHINA?
"Yeah. Darcy requested like a four month lay-off which we usually don't do, we usually go right in the studio and she basically said we've never taken any time off and I want four months off so it was one of those yeah, I think you're right, so we took four months off. But yeah, in that time I started probably just doing acoustic and piano demo's of what became some of the songs. But I think probably maybe only two of the songs are from those four months and then after that went to a whole 'nother gear of writing.
D'arcy played on the album and then she left once the album was finished?
"No, she left somewhere along the way. I guess what you would loosely term as halfway or two-thirds or something. But usually I mean by that point her work would be done anyway. Because the end of the album always gets into vocals and you know 90 guitar overdubs."
What does Jimmy's return and presence mean to the sound and outcome of MACHINA?
"I think there's the literal obvious like you know Jimmy's. I think Jimmy's the best drummer in the world so there's no getting around what he brings dynamically, but to me personally as a songwriter, he brings an intuitive ability to translate the songs into something that I hadn't necessarily anticipated. He'll take what would be a normal folk song and turn it into an anthem, and I'll take what I think is an anthem and turn it into you know a beautiful folk song. So he does that intuitively and I kind of trust his intuition and his ability to wind things into areas that I would anticipate. So I think that's the biggest difference. Because we had you know we had 80 drummers, you know who wanted to play and when Jimmy left I mean it was a gig that a lot of people wanted. My favorite part of the story is people called the day Jonathan died, people were calling our management for a job.
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