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New Smashing Pumpkins Song ‘Tiberius’ Includes ‘Epic Wizard Part’

Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan New Songs

A couple of weeks ago, Billy Corgan announced that Smashing Pumpkins were hard at work at not one, but two albums for 2015, tentatively titled Monuments to an Elegy and Day for Night. One detour into the world of pro wrestling reality TV and an experimental synth interpretation of Rumi poems later, Corgan is sharing more details of the upcoming LPs. Believe it or not, they sound really friggin’ weird.

“Worked through 4 songs today: TIBERIUS (with new and improved epic wizard part), THE SPANIARDS (de-lovely and expansive, set aside for ‘DAY FOR NIGHT;’ I think), OVERJOYED (a Howard fave, so you know what that means hand-waving fans), and MONUMENTS (which if memory serves had been COUGARED),” he sort of explained in a post titled “HALCYON QUADRATURES” on the new Pumpkins website.

According to another post, the “cougar” reference is an inside-joke category into which the band placed some of its potential new songs. Next up for Corgan and co. is pre-production, then whittling the song pile down to 12 or 13 cuts for Monuments. “It’s gonna be hard,” he wrote of the process.

Corgan also revealed this week that he’s a quarter of the way done writing his “spiritual memoir.” Here’s Billy: “After many fits and false start I can now report that I’ve just finished Section 1 of my book, God Is Everywhere From Here to There; with 3 more sections planned. With Part 1 clocking in around 120,000 words, I’d anticipate with the current pace that the writing process will be finished sometime around the end of this year; or early next.”

“For those that don’t know, the book is set as a spiritual memoir,” Corgan continued, “and is a dream-like take on one person’s journey through temporal life. What it is not is a celebrity tale. Ostensibly each section breaks down into sub-sections, and in the case of Part 1, totaled 3 in all. While the narrative is somewhat linear, time is treated for what it really is: an illusion; and memory: our own myth.”

For reference, the average novel is 64,000 words, while Tolstoy’s War and Peace finishes with 544,406, so Pumpkins fans might want to block out a few months to get through Corgan’s tome.