Billy Corgan has lived in the Highland Park area of Chicago for 20 years and owns a tea shop called Madame Zuzu's with his partner Chloé Mendel that's only a block away from the tragic Fourth of July shooting. Corgan and Mendel hosted a benefit concert at the cafe on Wednesday night (July 27) to raise money for the victims, and during the set Corgan debut a new song called "Photograph" that's inspired by the tragedy.
While introducing the song, Corgan explained that the idea came up after interviewers asked if he had thought about writing a song about the shooting, and so he repurposed a Smashing Pumpkins track he was working on to reflect his feelings. “I started playing something and thought, that could work. Took a nap, woke up and the song was spinning in my head,” he said. “This is my reaction, I guess you could say, to what happened. I don’t know if it’s a good song or a bad song, but it certainly expresses the way that I feel.”
He went on to detail the song's meaning. The first part is “explaining to somebody that I found a photograph of us standing in the very spot where this horrible thing happened. Suddenly you look at a photograph and suddenly it has meaning: ‘Oh, my god. We were in that spot.’ That’s what something like this does. It turns everything upside down. Good things become bad. Bad things become good. Simple things become complicated. Complicated things suddenly have no meaning, and certainly no resonance.”
Later in the song, Corgan reflects on a dream about a “young woman dancing by herself. She’s obviously dancing in my dream for those we’ve lost. My reaction is to try to explain to her, or ask her for something, which is interesting, because if she’s mourning the dead and the wounded, why do I need something from her? But I think we all have that reaction sometimes, right? We wonder what this has done to all of us. You could say it’s selfish. You could say it’s focused. But that’s what the rest of the song is about.”
You can watch Corgan debut the song and donate to the Highland Park community here.