Earlier this year, our T. Cole Rachel spoke to Billy Corgan about the forthcoming Oceania as well as the suite Teargarden By Kaleidyscope that contains it. On the origins of the project, here’s Corgan:



We’re in Sedona, Arizona, and about a week after that, everybody went home, and I was still there, working on my book. Mark Tulin, our friend and bassist from the Electric Prunes, died suddenly of a heart attack on Catalina –- he was doing a beach cleanup and just collapsed at 62 and just died -– so a week after we had parted as a band we were all back together for Mark’s funeral. It really, really shook me up and I can’t explain why. I mean he was a close friend, but it shook me up in a way I just couldn’t explain and something about it just led to this weird journey of like “OK I’m gonna go back and listen to all the work I did with Mark at the beginning of this process with Teargarden and then reexamine all this stuff that we’ve done recently.” And it took me on this weird journey of “What am I doing?” and “Why am I even bothering anymore?” and I had this kind of weird epiphany where I realized that some part of me was disengaged. And in a weird kind of way to honor Mark I thought, “I’m not gonna run away from that part of myself anymore. I’m actually gonna go there.” And that opened me up and a lot of the songs were figured out in the next six weeks. And we started convening in Chicago in April. And then worked about five and a half months straight, and the band would come and go at various times depending on who needed to do what. And that’s it.

Now, Oceania has hit the web as a free stream, so head to iTunes (warning: opens external application) to hear it. It’s out 6/19 on EMI.