Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins talking about/explaining the meaning of « Today »
This next song was written in a very difficult period of my life, we had put out our first album « Gish » in 1991 and we did the tour for about 14 months and I think the longest we had ever been on tour before that was about 20 days so for all of us it was a very , sort of, mind-numming experience. It was great but at the same time we were, sort of, fighting for our music and what we believed in which in 1991 and 1992 wasn’t as easy as it is today. So after we, sort of, built up this momentum on this tour for our record we came back to Chicago and I was living in this very bad apartment, with bad heat, with a bad hippie and I entered into probably the worst writing slump I’ve ever had. I probably couldn’t really write a good song for about eight months and also being in public in that particular period of my life brought out alot of feelings that I had, sort of, repressed from childhood, sort of, this weird abused child symptom where I locked everything away and figured well, I’ll never have to deal with that again and suddenly I found myself confronted with these demons that I’d thougth I’d locked away and I entered into this very horrible period of my life and I eventually ended, even at one point, sleeping on D’Arcy’s floor. I lived in a parking garage for awhile and I was completely obsessed with killing myself , it became my primary preoccupation, I guess, taking away songwriter I became a suicidal maniac, and ummm, you can laugh it’s funny… so out of the depths of this dispair I, sort of, bottomed out and it literally came down to a simple decision, at least in my mind at that time, which was either kill yourself or, sort of, get used(at this point it was like he was going to cry) to it and work and live and be happy and so I wrote this song, yes, as you can see I chose another form of death which is rock ‘n’ roll but,ummm, that being said I wrote this song at a, sort of, critical juncture in my life and not only did these songs, sort of, give me hope for the future but they certainly changed the band’s lives(it was like he was going to cry again) and one other, sort of , ironic point this song is , although the main lyric is « today is the greatest day », it… no, it’s not the song you think it is, it’s a different one, it’s pretty much like a joke song about how I wanna kill myself ,of course, nobody ever gets that ‘cause they get fixated on the positive lines but if you actually listen there’s way more negativity. But of course in this point of my life it is a positive song, because it’s about survival, and certainly our survival as well (he seems really nervous for whatever reason).
~*He begins the acoustic/piano version of the song « Today ».*~
(This speech was taken from VH1’s Storytellers on the Smashing Pumpkins, episode #134)
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My Seasonal Songs 
Summer 2001 
Sum 41-Fat Lip 
~News~