Jimmy Chamberlin Interview: Smashing Pumpkins Tour, New Song

On Tuesday (June 2), Jimmy Chamberlin joined Loudwire Nights to celebrate the recent tour announcement for the Smashing Pumpkins‘ celebration of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

Listen to the full conversation in the player near the end of this article.

“We’re always like, ‘How do we make this different or better,'” Chamberlin shared with Loudwire Nights‘ Chuck Armstrong about preparing to play Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in full on the upcoming Rats In a Cage tour.

“The songs for us never, they’re never really finished. There’s a couple of new leaves over here and there’s a new branch over here and maybe we’re thinking about trimming the tree a little bit. For us, they’re all vehicles of self-expression.”

Chamberlin said one of the things that excites him most about this tour is the fact that he’s a much better musician today than he was when he recorded Mellon Collie, so trimming the trees, so to speak, is something he’s looking forward to.

“I still practice a lot,” he admitted.

“I have teachers. I’m still working on becoming a great drummer. That journey has never ended for me. But I’m excited to see what the application of the current wisdom to those compositions will look and sound like. We’re going to celebrate the youthful version of those songs, but we’re going to apply an adult sensibility to them.”

Part of that adult sensibility, as Chamberlin explained, is that the songs will be “super heavy.”

“I think we’re a lot heavier of a band now,” he shared.

“When you get 30-plus years down the road, you have this ability to create density without being rambunctious or without being a bull in a china shop, like maybe we were a little bit with the Mellon Collie stuff. I’m looking forward to really applying a new sensibility to this stuff and trying to maintain the same audacity that we had when we made the record.”

When he thinks about making Mellon Collie, he was quick to recognize what an ambitious endeavor it was for the band.

“We were so insular and we were so insulated and we didn’t really let other people in the studio,” he recalled.

“There was just the four of us and our crew and we worked every day. And then [producers] Flood and Alan [Moulder] would come in and we worked with them for three or four months and they became a huge part of this thing.”

Smashing Pumpkins Have a New Song Produced by Butch Vig

In the midst of celebrations for the tour announcement, Billy Corgan shared on social media that the Smashing Pumpkins had also recently recorded a song with producer Butch Vig. The band and Vig worked together in the ’90s, but haven’t partnered since the Pumpkins’ second full-length album, 1993’s Siamese Dream.

“I had actually had a vision and a meditation that we were going to work with Butch again and then somehow it just materialized,” Chamberlin said.

“I’m not taking responsibility for it, I’m just putting it out there.”

Chamberlin shared that they had a chance to record a new song and Vig was at the top of their list when they considered who might produce it.

“Billy and I and James [Iha] had bene talking about it, we had just talked about working again with Butch weeks before this whole opportunity came about,” he revealed.

“I think we all put it in orbit. We had the intention. We put it out there in the universe and the universe was like, ‘Hey, great idea. Here he is.’ We spent five or six days in the studio in L.A. doing drums and guitars and bass, Billy and James and I and Butch, and it was magical, man.”

He expressed how much fun they had together, something that they did not take for granted in the moment.

“A lot of this stuff, we’re left to our own devices these days,” he said.

“We have engineers that work on stuff, but generally, we’re the last word on this. To have somebody like Butch, who I trust — this is one of the few people that I would let babysit my daughter — I trust this guy implicitly. And to have somebody like that in your corner making suggestions…Butch Vig is responsible for making me a much better drummer than I ever would have been without him. To have him in my corner again and saying, ‘Hey Jimster, why don’t you try this drum groove or maybe leave that hi-hat out’…it was a blast, man. We had so much fun.”

What Else Did Smashing Pumpkins’ Jimmy Chamberlin Discuss on Loudwire Nights?

What he thinks when people say Mellon Collie represents the band: “I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s the band at a certain point, but the new album, Aghori Mhori Mei, Zodeon [at the Crystal Hall], the stuff we did during COVID, is just as cool, man. It’s all music to me. I don’t really quantify it that way.”
Another reason he’s excited to play Mellon Collie in full on the upcoming tour: “You’ve got to go out and you’ve got to express the breadth of your catalog and you’ve got to play a little bit from everything or people are going to be upset or maybe somebody’s upset and we don’t want that to happen. We want to make sure that everybody gets serviced, they want to go home feeling like they had that experience of what the Pumpkins mean to them. So we try to cover all those bases, but to be able to be afforded the opportunity to be this indulgent is pretty cool.”
Prepping for the tour: “We’ve really started early on a lot of the production stuff and there’s going to be a lot of cool visual stuff. I mean, it’s going to be a very compelling experience for people to come in, they’re going to see and hear a lot of stuff that’s going to blow their minds.”