VH1 Storytellers Season 5 Episode 7 Smashing Pumpkins

"Today": Billy Corgan relates that the song "was written in a very difficult period of my life. We had just put out our first album, and we were on tour for about 14 months. For all of us, it was a rather mind-numbing experience. We were fighting for our music and what we believed in, which in 1991-92 wasn't as easy as it seems today ... I entered into possibly the worst writing slump I've ever had, I couldn't write a reasonably good song for about eight months. But out of the depths of despair, I sort of bottomed out, and it came down to 'either kill yourself, or get used to it and work and live and be happy.' So I wrote this song."

"Try": "One criticism I've seen recently is that people say the songs don't seem as personal as they used to, they don't seem as dramatic or emotional," notes Corgan. "I agree, but that's because I feel colder in my life. Everything that's happened to me in my life has made me feel more distant from my feelings. And so when I write a song like 'Try,' I am expressing what I feel, it's just that people don't understand it."

"1979": Corgan says the band was nearing completion of an album, and time was getting scarce: "Flood, who was producing the album, said 'You've got 24 hours to make it happen, or it's not going to be on the album.' I spent that night and the following morning writing the lyrics. The memory behind this song is that I was about 18 years old, driving around, it was raining heavily, and I was sitting in the car at a traffic light. That's the memory -- the sort of feeling of waiting for something to happen, it's not quite there yet, but just around the corner. That's the memory I wrote the song from."