Shame

"WHAT TURNED IT AROUND?

Billy: "Shame" was the turning point. It was the three of us and a drum machine, just like we were when we started 10 years ago, before Jimmy joined the band. I wrote this song at 10 in the morning, and we started playing it and the chemistry of the Pumpkins just reappeared. By three that afternoon, we had recorded it. What you hear is that performance.

THE LYRIC IS UNUSUALLY STRAIGHTFORWARD FOR YOU.

Billy: A friend asked if the directness of those lyrics worried me. But there is a different power in that. A simplicity. I think that's why that song is so defining. In that one song you get everything thats good and bad about the Pumpkins: a spontaneous, dreamy quality, a certain kind of emotion. I'm singing out of tune. The lyrics border on inane. I thought as I was writing it that I would have to change the lyrics later. But it somehow congealed. We try to be the super-fuzz rock stars, but that's not who we really are. That song is who we really are.

1998-Request

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"Shame" also features a drum machine but was actually recorded live. "I was feeling really sad one morning," Corgan explains. "I got up, wrote the song. We went in that day and did it in three hours. What you're hearing is what I felt that day."

1998 Rolling Stone