Billy Corgan Writing 'Spiritual Memoir' About Smashing Pumpkins

Billy Corgan arrives at the 7th Annual MusiCares MAP Fund benefit concert on May 6, 2011 in Los Angeles.

Michael Tran/FilmMagic

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan isn't just working on reissuing the band's back catalog and recording two new albums, Oceania and Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. He's also writing an autobiography, titled God is Everywhere, from Here to There, that he described as a "spiritual memoir."

"It's a very interesting take inside my personal life and my band life," Corgan tells Rolling Stone. "I've decided to write this on my own, which is complete insanity. I try to spend about an hour a day on the book, which is the time I would usually put towards music writing. So that means I have to find that hour, because I won't give up that music writing time. It's a journey, for sure." He says that with around 300 pages completed, he's finished writing one-third of the book.

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But don't expect to find any of Corgan's revealing "online diary entries" that he posted several years ago on his Myspace page. "It's totally fresh material. When I started talking about child abuse stuff [on MySpace], and people started saying, 'You have no right to talk about that stuff,' it was a total turn off. Because people start saying, 'Well, my dad ripped my arm off, so you can't talk.' Well, I'm just talking about my journey. I apologize that I didn't get beat more. Talking about child abuse in public brings out a lot of weird stuff from other people that haven't healed from it, so I just got really bummed out, said 'Fuck it,' and stopped."

God is Everywhere is scheduled to be released sometime next year by St. Martin's Press.

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Song Stories

“Baby Got Back”

Sir Mix-a-Lot | 1992

While watching a Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl, Sir Mix-a-Lot thought the skinny female models in the ad didn’t represent reality. So he wrote this ode to ample bottoms, featuring its famous to-the-point lyric: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” MTV banished the video, featuring shaking booties and sexually suggestive fruit, to 9 p.m. or later. “I thought my career was over,” he told Rolling Stone. “Then I called Rick Rubin, and I told him the video was banned, and he was like, 'Great!' We sold another 2 million records.”

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