So Billy Corgan has admitted he wanted to kill himself not once but several times! In a recent interview on Last Call With Carson Daly, he declared:
‘I almost killed myself about three, four, seven times. I literally started planning my death and what I would leave behind, and what I was gonna write. Three or four times in my life.’
NME noticed that this isn’t the first time as the songwriter told the newspaper about some dark thoughts he had when working on ‘Siamese Dream’:
"I was suicidal, and I’d been plotting my own death for about two months. And if you’ve ever read anything about the warning signs of suicide one of them is you give away all your stuff, and I’d given away all my stuff, I gave away all my records, I started giving away my guitars.’
‘I was fantasizing about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity.’
No wonder that Corgan would think about his funeral, he is the kind of guy to be that into himself, honestly I couldn’t care less about my funeral, because I will not be there anymore…
When Elliott Smith died in 2003, I remember reading articles describing his supposed suicide as a logical continuity with his writing and thoughts process, I even remember someone describing Elliott as a fortuneteller crafting stories about his own future, and this made me cringe… It was way too easy to do that: oh you write about drugs, so you must be a junky, you write about suicide, so you'll kill yourself… come on, there are a lot of artists who fetish the suicide thing and the number of songwriters who have written about suicide could not fit on this page!
Elliott was writing about drugs as metaphors for relationships and I have never thought that 'Needle in the Hay’ or ‘The White Lady loves you more’ were predictions of his future,… but if you buy this, it’s way too easy to go with the flow and make ‘From A Basement On the Hill’ the album that predicted his future, as Elliott 'fulfilled his destiny' when he was still recording it! oh just because there are several references to death and suicide?
It’s stupid and lazy, I interpret the album a whole different way, and there is no such thing than fulfilling one’s destiny because destiny doesn’t exist and the future is unwritten.
We have to stop building myths around our dead musicians and songwriters, Haven’t we passed these times of antic heroes? All of them were human beings with no insights toward their future but with human problems such as depression. Billy Corgan has thought about killing himself and has previewed his funerals many times but he is still alive,… so much for predicting the future.