Soma
"It's about the girlfriend who left me last year. I tried to put all my anger in those words, even though i'm just as much to blame for the break-up. Soma is based on the idea that a love relationship is almost the same as opium: it slowly puts you to sleep, it soothes you, and gives you the illusion of sureness and security."
June 1993
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"The first day we started working on "Soma," I said to James [Iha, second guitarist], this is going to be a long song, so let's try to make it shorter. After we'd turned it into a short song, it didn't feel complete, so then we started hacking out new parts. By the time we got to the studio, the song was probably about a minute and a half longer that it ended up, so we cut out a bunch of stuff at the last minute. Here's a good example of the "anal" me: I had this riff that went A-C-G-F, and I wanted to do this thing that my dad showed me, which is, when you get to the F, modulate down one half step and then start the riff again, which then forms E-G-D-C. This part comes right after the lead, after which we modulate back into the chorus and back into a B. But I wanted to carry that modulation idea through seven times, so we recorded it that way, and even though it was fun to do, it sounded fucking boring as shit [laughs]. Ultimately, we cut all those other modulations out and only modulated once, which ended up as the best decision I could have made. Up until that point, one part of me was taking the song somewhere, and it took this other part of me to say, hey, that's fucking lame. "
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Billy: Songs like that kind a start out like a very simple idea. Like with Soma it started with a riff that James had and we played the riff for simingly forever then we would add a part here and add a part there and it would just it will evolve lets say two or three months because finding that really delicate balance between form and function and those songs tend to take a long time, and drive everyone nuts, because I change them about 40 times.
Ron: But you don't spend a lot of time writing it down you just do it.
Billy: No, because songs like that have to come from the heart. It's not something you can just kind of sit down and write on paper, you know it's the emotional parts of it. It needs to be felt out.
1996-KROQ Breakfast With Billy
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It was over a year since I had watched Corgan lay down the overdubs for Siamese Dream at Triclops Sound Studios in Atlanta. He wasn't a pop star then just a very serious musician intent on calibrating every sonic aspect of the record. The overdubs were what producer Butch Vig called" backgroundy stuff, " those parts that swim around athletically in many slower Siamese Dream passages, softer counterparts of an overall guitar attack inspired, Corgan grinned "by the Gulf War."
The song "Soma" had been called "coma" that day. Iha's guitar had been rigged to vibrate an aqueous effect. It sounded at first too bright, then too analogies drenched for Corgan's ears. As Iha kept strumming three cords-"three cords, three cords, three cords," he'd actually begun to chant:"nice and smooth" Vig had coached- Corgan monitored the processor's readouts, puzzling over the effect's numerous numerical permeations. He and Vig finally found a sonic character that they liked.
"I want to try it one more time with a pick, " Corgan said. "We've been working on these stupid guitars for two days."
"They're not stupid, " Vig replied. the mood of that session was loose yet as goal oriented as any I'd attended, calm yet unapologetically intense. When at last corgan and Vig agreed to tape the effect, a phantom feedback noise showed up as well, not guitar and not keyboard in it's icy, inhuman character. Corgan, halfway out of the control room and eager to watch a football game on TV, stopped in his tracks. "I know what your going to say, " Vig said, lifting off his baseball cap. "right, " Corgan said "Let's get the feedback." Vig spent the next 45-minutes turning a knob until the feedback was properly phrased. "Okay, " he said. "It's done, now let's do some goddamn rocking' guitars." "I dun no, " said Corgan. "I'm feeling kind of wispy." He and the other Pumpkins set up in the tracking room to work on an arrangement of "Suicide Kiss", a song which never made it onto the record but was clearly very gulf war. Vig watched through the glass there was nothing wispy about it.
1994 - Musician
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Question: What would be the most difficult song you've recorded and why?
James: "Soma" maybe, that was a pain in the butt
Billy: yeah, probably "soma"
Caller: how long did it take?
Billy: it took about 10 days to record, and four days to mix
James: in about two weeks
Billy: when you listen to it, it actually lasts that long too
1996 - JJJ Interview
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