Disarm
"If I was objective, I’d say that Disarm is the most amazing thing on the record. It doesn’t sound like anything else on there, it sounds so brutally honest. "
-1994 The Great Pumpkin That Never Arrived
---
"I don't know if it's my Piscean nature but I sit in a lot of different chairs. For example, a song like "Disarm" was completely intuitive. There's nothing conscious about that song. It, like, wrote itself."
---
"We've tried three different versions of the song "Disarm," from playing it just like the record to playing the same arrangement in a very stripped-down fashion - just voice and guitar, with the drums entering halfway through. Then we did a totally heavy version for a TV show in England. It was the exact same arrangement, but the approach was different. As the tours went on, I continually dicked with the arrangements of the songs from Gish. With Siamese Dream, we haven't changed one single arrangement, but we have changed the way we attack the songs. "
-1994 Guitar Player
---
"There are songs that are born of their day, that just come to you, but I can count them on one hand. They tend to be my better-known songs because they're so immediately catchy - "Today" and "Disarm," for example. "
-1994 guitar player
---
Billy: Um, we always just try to think 'what's the best thing for this song?', you know? And, not really, 'cause people are like (takes on some sort of farmer's accent) "Well, I came to hear Disarm and I didn't hear that string part'. And its like, well, you know, if you want to hear the string part, listen to the album. I mean, we try to make the best album, and it's just those kinds of decisions. We sit around and go 'what ridiculous things can we do now?'
KROQ: The more you do in the studio the harder it is to do it on stage.
Billy: But to me Disarm is a really good song, and it sounds just as good in other ways. But people fall in love with a version, you know, and as anyone who's seen us live knows we can't even come close to playing anything like that so we don't even try.
1996-kroq breakfast with billy.
---
BILLY: The reason I wrote Disarm was because, I didn't have the guts to kill my parents, so I thought I'd get back at them through song. And rather then have an angry, angry, angry violent song I'd thought I'd write something beautiful and make them realize what tender feelings I have in my heart, and make them feel really bad for treating me like shit
JIMMY: [laughs]
INTERVIEWER: Do you think it worked ?
BILLY: Yeah it's my mothers favorite song on the album.
BILLY: My original idea was, and this is what I told Vince Scott (Video producer of Disarm) for the band to be playing in the sky. I didn't want any lights(?), like here they are in the corner, here they are in Spain(?). So, he came up with the idea of fairy talesque, you know, where things were, like how a child would see fairy tale things like things are bigger and smaller, and aren't on scale. So, he, he took my original conception and the look I wanted turned it into that so. For the first time ever a video director actually understood the language that I was speaking.
BILLY: There's just to much pressure sometimes to come up with the video of the ages, and, and I'm just starting to feel that we should apply the same aesthetics to videos that we apply to the records we make and its unfortunate because we're not video directors so it's not the most easiest thing to do.
1993-rage
---
A song gets very specific in the studio; everything from the tempo to the instrument can determine the feeling. How do we want the drums, what's the intent there? How aggressive is the bass going to be? The amount of treble you use, the kind of strings you play- all those things determining a kind of emotional bed for the songs. You can get a song like 'Mayonnaise,' which has loud guitars but the attack is still muted, kind of lush even though it's loud. Or a song like 'Disarm,' which is probably the most intense moment on the record even though it's not loud at all. It was a great lesson to me to know that you didn't have to be loud and abrasive to create that kind of head rush."
-1993 pulse
---
" 'Disarm' is about my childhood and how I turned into an asshole," Corgan later explains to a reporter. "
1994-spin
---
"But my personality is so strong that it kind of bubbled out from underneath, and it was tough to distinguish who was the faker and who was real. I remember the first five or six times we did the song 'Disarm' live, it was completely overwhelming because it was like standing onstage and saying 'This is who I really am. Faker.' I expected people to throw rocks."
1994-rolling stone
---
Interview- We're gonna watch the video for Disarm. How do you feel about Disarm? Disarm is a song, in a way, Smashing Pumpkins broke out with. Great song, acoustic, the video was amazing, the video IS amazing. How do you feel about that song? That song was like a song of perception...
Billy- I think it's a very special song. I mean, it's one of those songs that 20 years from now it won't sound from 1993. It will sound from whenever. I don't think a lot of, I think there's been , I think there's only been a couple 2 or 3 songs that we've done that have been like Disarm, they're of a different time.
-dec 96 mtv latin america
---
Caller - hey, i was wondering what compelled you guys to experiment with the new instruments like the steel guitat and the harp and the chimes on disarm?
James- um.. boredom, really
Billy- the guitar, as for anyone who knows and plays the guitar, it gets pretty old pretty fast, and on top of that, the guitar is so used in rock music that its kinda hard to find anything new on it, so i think we just stated to gravitate to " oh, this makes a cool noise" and "nobodys ever used this" kind of thing. so, thats kind of where our heads were, that kind of stuff.
96 modern rock live
---