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RECOVERY MAGAZINE
08/99
ON SONGWRITING Courtney: It was a difficult album to write because it took a lot of growth, discipline, meticulous songwriting, craftsmanship/womanship. We had to go back to the basics, deconstruct Beatles songs, figure out how they were written. When you come from punk rock, you don't necessarily know that. Melissa: We scoped a lot of classic rock. C: Everything from punk rock to Cheap Trick. ON BILLY CORGAN C: Within a minute of meeting him he was playing me some bad solo guitar saying, "I'm gonna be a huge rock star," and I was going, "That's good, 'cause so am I!" I wouldn't call it a love connection be we had a good understanding of each other. Over the two years we were making this new album, he spend about 12 days with me, helping with vocal stuff. People tend to say, "They're just girls---they can't have written those songs." And it's like, "Kiss my ass!" I worked so hard to be a good songwriter and we've written so much of this record and you can't take that away from us. ON AMBITION C: We've always been a musically ambitious band and we've always plotted to make a classic rock record. I wanted to make a really big records that didn't compromise---because I like ABBA, because I love the Hollies, the Beatles, because I love pop muskc, because I love Fleetwood Mac, because we have that side to us a well as our punk rock side. We knew we could fold those things in together. ON ANGST C: Once you've gone on stage with your schoolgirl diaries and bleated them out, you've done your thing and you can't keep doing it. It's a bore for me, a bore for you, a bore for everybody. I don't need to tell you everything. So, yeah, there's a lot of pain and emptiness (on the new CD) but there's a lot of romance and passion in these lyrics. ON GRUNGE C: If anybody has the license to write the last grunge song, it's us, and I'm gonna do it! ON PUNK? C: We were never a punk band. For me, punk had its roots in a real male attitude and I was always too ambitious for it. I was never a discontented working class lad. I was a guttersnipe who wanted to get the hell out of my town and do things that girls didn't do and and take over the world on my terms without having to make crap pop music and without having to be synthy and pretty. I wanted to do it my own way. ON FAME C: I'm good at it. Before I was famous, tabloids would write about me. It's just something that seemed to happen to me. I'm like an architect. I want to build monuments that are going to stand. The down side is that you have a whole set of problems that nobody can understand. People dream about you, people obsess about you, peple write about you, people stalk you. People do stuff to you that you've sig on for not knowing how powerful it can be. If you don't get more grounded, you can become whatever cartoon you've been assigned to that day. Fame has a lot of problems that only weird New York psychatrists understand. ON GIRLS IN ROCK M: Girls need to see mre females playing music who aren't just the lead singers. If there were more girl groups in the Top 40, they'd get the encouragement to think, "we can all hang out together after school and do this," C: In Australia, you have this great Rock & Roll High School, I don't know if we're gonna do this but, do encourage girls, we were planning to find the better guitarists in the school and take them on tour---because we need an extra guitar player and they get school credit. They don't have to be as good as Eric---they just have to be better than me, which doesn't take too much [laughs]. ON ATTITUDE C: The example that's out there for females is that the road to edgy, angry rock stardom is littered with broken bodies. It's important to me to not only survive this, but to thrive on this, because I have to show that somebody could. special thankyou to EMMA |
