Billy Corgan Quotes

The music that I'm known for is quiet and gentle, although when I was growing up and as a teenager, I was playing the opposite - I was screaming and playing bass and those loud electric guitars.

I don't find inspiration by just sitting down with a guitar anymore. I lost that. I started being so interested in other kinds of music.

I always had wished somebody else would sing my songs, but there wasn't anybody who knew them, so I sang them myself and eventually became a better singer and guitar player.

In my first bands I was a singing guitar player, but if you heard any of those songs you wouldn't describe me as a singer. But I can make it work.

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it's never going to bug you. But here's the secret about the guitar - it's defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

I used to play violin, but I wasn't very good! I'm starting to learn guitar.

I've been working to define my individual style and vision and I believe it is reflected in the music. I feel better mentally, physically and spiritually so I've brought that to the music. I still make love songs so there are some messages in the music about men appreciating their women. I'm also still bringing party and club hits but with more substance in the music.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

I have a lot of advantages: I'm not addicted to horrifying pills. I also have surrounded myself with far more caring and upright individuals. And I wasn't abused as a child, so I'm doing okay!

So yeah, it's nothing that I'm doing on purpose, I just think that the more records, the more songs that I write, the more records that I make, you're obviously going to fall into a specific style and thank God it's a style that people are into.

So few hip-hop artists have ever advanced. Their songs on their seventh, eighth albums sound exactly like the songs on their first album. More than an artist, I'm a real person-and real people grow. And I wanna just sing my growth.

When it's a funky uptempo song, you're basically having the same kind of release you would have when you have sex, only it lasts longer. Whether you're playing it on the guitar or on the dance floor, you're in that moment.

For us Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp is bigger than the music. It is very much an experience that brings a lot of skills and discoveries about yourself together. In that respect, it also enables you to learn that being in a band is a lot tougher than sitting around and playing guitar in your bedroom.

When I used to write songs, especially on my own, it was just me and a guitar.

Punk. . .was more a kind of do-it-yourself, anyone-can-do-it attitude. If you only played two notes on the guitar, you could figure out a way to make a song out of that, and that's what it was all about.

I play the living hell out of my guitars daily, and as sure as the sun rises in the east, killer licks, ideas, grooves, patterns and songs erupt every time.

Each album comes from definitely a different period in the evolution of each of us individually as creators and the role that we take in life. The external stimuli changed... so the songs are full of lots of different meanings.

I bad a piano long before I bad a guitar, and the practice I got just playing those three chords in a basic 12-bar blues song was very important.

When I originally wrote "Jealousy," it was more like an exercise to try to write a girl-group kind of pop song. It was really contrary to most of the material I'd ever written. I didn't pay much attention to the song after I'd recorded it. I didn't really perform it at all the last 20 years. When it came time to make the new record, I decided to make peace with the song and have fun with it.

I really wanted to get that dynamic on the record onto people and let them know it wasn't just a simple strumming along the guitar type of thing without ramming it down their throats so I kind of went the opposite way and sang some of the songs more quietly which allowed for the louder parts to sound as though there were more. It was the only way singing those songs made sense to me.

It's really very easy for me to be in The Cardinals, because I bring my voice, my guitar, and my songs to them, and then we all play around to find out what works.

Quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times, a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.

The Metallica film was like this incredible life experience where I learned the most through guys that stereotypically you would think couldn't offer much to you. That's what I love about the film: It explodes your stereotype of them - they're not just a bunch of lugheads banging on the guitar.

I wasn't put on this earth to amass money or personal wealth. I was put on this earth to play guitar and write songs.

I think the musical evolution I've gone through has come from all the work with the material.