Happy Birthday to Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan, who turns 55 today (March 17th)!!! Corgan will always be best remembered for writing the Pumpkins' string of classics including “Today,” “1979,” “Tonight, Tonight,” “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” “Zero,” and “Siva,” among many others.
Corgan and the band will be heading out for an extended spring run next month, kicking things off on April 30th at Memphis' Beale Street Music Festival and playing through May 29th when the band hits Chillicothe, Illinois' Summer Camp Music Festival.
Smashing Pumpkins released its last album, Cyr, on November 27th, 2020. The set peaked at Number 10 on Billboard's Top Rock Albums chart.
Billy Corgan explained that the last thing he ever wanted was for the Pumpkins to reunite and be viewed as a nostalgia act: “To go back under the Smashing Pumpkins name engendered a lot of people expecting us to be nothing more than a reunion band, playing its greatest hits, and with a fan base not particularly keen to listen to the new music. What I try to tell people that get caught up in the reunion kind of concepts — like where are the original members and stuff like this — the band was founded on an idea that it must be progressive and it must always be moving forward.”
