Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan has a lot to say about Spotify, Courtney Love and our ‘dystopia’

Billy Corgan is no stranger to upsetting people on the internet. Leave me the f— alone.” Written and produced entirely by Corgan, “Cyr” features the Smashing Pumpkins’ co-founding guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, plus new guitarist Jeff Schroeder and touring vocalist/keyboardist Katie Cole. Twenty-eight songs were culled from an initial batch of 50, and so came to be the Pumpkins’ lasting alt-rock “Odyssey.” “I wasn’t governed by fear,” says Corgan. I’m going to define my environment.’” Corgan says he’s already working on a 33-song rock opera, which will become the final installment of a trilogy that started with “Mellon Collie,” followed by the Pumpkins’ 2000 album, “Machina/The Machines of God.” A conceptual “proto-cyber-metal” album inspired by musical theater, “Machina” was the last album to feature all four founding members, including bassist D’arcy Wretzky; she departed the band in the midst of the recording process. “Courtney once said, ‘He stopped writing hits when he stopped writing about me,’ which of course is not true,” Corgan says with a smirk.