1979

"The most frequently asked question about "1979" is, 'What is the 'ooh-ahh-ahh' sound at the end of every phrase?" Flood and I were tracking the song, and I started humming the "oohs" like a melody line. I sang them to tape, we sampled the pertinent ones, electronically manipulated them, and looped them against the drum beat. One of my favorite songs from the album. "

Guitar World - Jan 1997

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"That's me turning the corner, finally stepping back from childhood," he says. "what I love about 1980 is there's no pain in it. It's a resolution."

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GS: Wasn't "1979" one of the last songs written for the album?

CORGAN: it was the last song. I was writing songs while we were making the album because I felt it was incomplete. We wound up with over 40 songs, so we'd stare at them for hours saying, "This has got to go." It would get pretty brutal. I demoed out the basic music for "1979," and we practiced it a few times. Flood wanted to take the tune off the board so we wouldn't spend more time on it, but I said, "Let me have one more day." I went home and wrote the whole song that night, words and everything. The next day I came in, played the new demo for him, and he said "That's it! It's done!" That demo is still floating around somewhere, and it's pretty damned weird.

"1979" has a real immediacy to it; there's just something about the riff and the vocal. The singles are always like that, though. They come to you pretty fast. It's funny, because that melody is the very first melody I sand against the riff. Sometimes I have to "mine" the melody; you have to dig around until you find something good and solid, like "Today" and "Disarm" [from Siamese Dream]. Those were the first melodies I ever sang against the chords. And when you find melodies like that, everything seems to just fall into place effortlessly. It's as though the song is already written, and you're just trying to find the thread. It's a weird feeling when you hit upon that.

1996-Guitar School

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GS: One of the hallmarks of your rythm-guitar style is you incorporation of smooth "voice-leading" chords that blend into each other because of close voicings and shared tones. Is that something that you are consciously aware of, and do you use it as a tool in writing guitar parts?

CORGAN: I love that kind of thing, and am always looking for ways to make it happen. I use that technique in the middle eight of "1979" and in the verse section of "Love." That's one of my favorite things to do. It's also on "Thru the Eyes of Ruby". I like the way the thirds of all the chords shift around. Cheap Trick uses that technique a lot, and so did John Lennon. I don't know if I picked it up from listening to them, or if it came naturally.

1996-Guitar School

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Billy: Well..you know..For example if you take..if you take the four singles on Mellon Collie..Zero, Tonight, Bullet, and 1979..If we were only working on an album with those four songs and maybe 6 or 7 others, I think those songs probably would've been better because we would've focused more on those songs. I mean, 1979 was written...basically in a day, and recorded..like in the following 3 days. So the entire amount of input time on 1979 was probably about 5 days. And it turned out good and I'm very happy with it, but you still wonder what you would've done if you had worked on it a little more. You know, those kinds of things..that's all. So I'm looking forward to, now on the next album getting back to just doing one single album and really focusing on that one album and making every song incredible. With Mellon Collie, the idea was to make an incredible record...that was beyond compare in modern rock. And..I feel that we did that, but individually certain songs probably suffer or aren't as good as they could be because we...we worked on so many things.

1996 - The Berlin Bullet

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"We saw "1979" as a real jumping-off point for what the next record might sound like."

1998 - Request

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Interviewer: I can see that, too. The next song we're going to play is 1979, and when you talk about um, you know, what you used to write about, now you really seem, as you said in the Tribune this morning, you're concentrating on writing about you know what life is like for kids these days. 1979 I think is a real nice portrait of sort of ...I'm reading it as sort of teenage restlessness, it seems to be, have charatoristics of...

Billy: Really, that's actually kind of an...this, well this song is kind of interesting 'cause it was the last song that actually got put on the album and we were actually going to throw it off the album and I went home and kind of completely rewrote the song in one night and came back the next day and Flood just loved it and we recorded it like pretty much right there.

Interviewer: And as we listen to this I think it has a really interesting backing track, it's really lulling, it brings you along, there's all sorts of weird little sound effects in it, too, where did they come from?

Billy: That's all the electronic equipment we've been using, sampling and stuff. I think it's really, this kind of an interesting way where you can still retain your identity musically but still encompass the new technology available to make a different kind of music. So it's kind of like you know it's like synthesizers without the hokey like synetsizer parts, you know.

1995- pre-riviera show interview

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"He just said, 'Not good enough,' and was ready to drop it," says Corgan, "but I had a gut feeling about this song from the very beginning." He accepted Flood's implied challenge. "It was almost like I was afraid to go where this song was taking me. It's the kind of song that if I thought about doing it on the previous albums, I'd have questions about whether I'd sound shitty doing it. It's just not the typical Pumpkins song. So when he was hesitating about putting it on, it riled me. I thought, 'No fucking way, this is not another toss-off song.' It really inspired me to finish it and prove him wrong. So that night I wrote the entire song in about four hours. The next day Flood heard it one time and said, 'It's on the album.' "

1996-chicago tribune

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Caller- hi, i was wondering, whats the meaning between the song 1979?

Billy - um, well, thats a good question too. i cant really say specifically, i just kinda had this feeling..i used to get this feeling.. i had this bad camero car that my parents gave me, and you know, i used to drive it around, and there i was, stuck in the suburbs of chicago. and i used to get this feeling when i was driving around, it was like i wsnt free, but i felt kind of free cos i was driving around, and i was trying to get that feeling, that feeling where you're not really sure you know where you're going, but you're gonna get there soon, somehow kinda thing. adn so, thats kinda what its about, i mean the specifics as to they they pertain to my life are not extremely important, but i think everyone can relate.

96 Modern Rock Live