We knew something was afoot the other day after both Spinner and MTV tweeted about Billy Corgan stopping by their offices. Corgan, it seems, was plotting the premiere of the first song off the forthcoming 44-song Smashing Pumpkins album and EP collection, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. Stream and download “A Song for a Son” for free below or watch video of Corgan recording part of the guitar solo here.

If Corgan holds true to his promise, 43 more songs will be available for free digitally in the coming months, while a physical product will be sold in the form of 11 4-song EPs. The tracklist to the first installment of said EPs was announced on the official SP Twitter today, as well, so now we presumably have track titles for the next 3 Teargarden singles:

1) A Song for a Son
2) Astral Planes,
3) Widow Wake My Mind
4) A Stitch in Time

Stream or download “A Song for a Son” below:

It’s been five years since he published his first and only book of poetry, Blinking with Fists, but Billy Corgan has somehow found time between discussing C. G. Jung at the NYPL, constructing puppets for Gothageddon episode 2, and recording dozens of songs for the new, free Smashing Pumpkins album/EP collection, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, to start work on two new literary projects. On his Everything From Here To There blog, Corgan writes:

As we told you he would last month, Billy Corgan participated in The Red Book Dialogues, a series of discussions held at NYC’s Rubin Museum of Art. Corgan and his fellow participants (including David Byrne, Jonathan Demme, Gloria Vanderbilt and Alice Walker) were invited to “respond to and interpret a folio from famed psychiastrist Carl Jung’s Red Book as a starting point for wide ranging conversation” accompanied by a psychoanalyst.

In a news post on the official Smashing Pumpkins site, JillySP describes Corgan’s turn with the book: Dr. Morgan Stebbins, psychoanalyst, handed him the book and Corgan opened it to this painting. “Corgan began to free-associate his reaction to the painting: to the Egyptian boat, on the river of mortality, shadowed by a giant fish with teeth (‘I am a Pisces,’ he laughed), to the myth of Orpheus. Not even two minutes into the discussion, Corgan joked, ‘Do I need to be committed?’”

Corgan continued, discussing his childhood (“his teachers used to complain about his intensity, asking his step-mother to tell him to stop staring at them”), songwriting (“an empty vessel experience”) and more. Click here for the aforementioned review; if you’d like to watch the entire dialogue, go thataway.

David Lynch Foundation Television, aka DFL.TV, followed Billy Corgan around recently and have posted a great HD video (via Flavorwire), which includes footage from the recording studio, the audition of 19-year-old Smashing Pumpkins drummer Mike Byrne, and an interview.

In one funny bit from the Q&A, Corgan describes how a song originally written for a Shaquille O’Neal album ended up on the Lost Highway soundtrack after Lynch rejected his initial contribution. Also, the audition footage is particularly amazing because we actually get to watch as Corgan meets the new Smashing Pumpkins drummer and is subsequently floored by Byrne’s skills.

Watch it here or below:

Considering how many musicians have contracted the H1N1 virus, aka swine flu, of late (Marilyn Manson, Kasabian, Jens Lekman, a Backstreet Boy, etc.), I’m not surprised that famous rockers may start chiming in on the national debate over President Obama’s plans for quelling the outbreak and the controversial swine flu vaccine.

Billy Corgan, for one, is quite wary of the vaccine and the potential for mandatory inoculation laws. In fact, he considers some of the messages coming from the government and media to be “propaganda.”

“I say ‘propaganda’ because, in my heart, there is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic,” Corgan writes on his new blog. “Our American President Obama has declared a national emergency about this virus, which he in his own words said was, at this point, a preventative measure. So, why declare an emergency if there isn’t one?”

Billy Corgan took a break from recording the upcoming 44-song Smashing Pumpkins album, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, to partake in a puppet wrestling showdown this past Friday that resulted in some prime blog bait. Episode one of “Gothageddon” features primarily a feud between Corgan and a puppet of The Cure’s Robert Smith, but Corgan-voiced versions of Amanda Palmer, Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy, and ex-SP guitarist James Iha make pseudo cameos as well.

I’m not going to even try to explain the plot of this intentionally batsh*t crazy video, but I will say it has the same “bad trip” feel of Neil Young’s lip dub vid, Ryan Adams’ GORF review, and the Kanye West/Spike Jonze short “We Were Once A Fairytale.” The Internet was made for this stuff, right?

Watch “Gothageddon” here or below (via HU):

It’s common knowledge that baby-faced crooner Michael Bublé enjoys borrowing other people’s songs for a little Sinatra-esque cover version, but has the 34-year-old boy next door taken to borrowing album covers as well? That’s what the Smashing Pumpkins are suggesting and it looks like they may have a case (against the art director perhaps).

It’s fitting that Billy Corgan, who just launched a spiritually-minded site/blog, has joined an impressive list of participants in an upcoming open discussion series at NYC’s Rubin Museum of Art (via Hipsters United) on Carl Jung, a psychiatrist who “broke off from [his mentor] Freud,” as World of Psychology notes, to develop his own theories, which “place more emphasis on the spiritual side of our inner psyche.”

Jung’s The Red Book, a “part journal, part mythological novel” that was 16 years in the making and only recently officially published, will be the starting point of conversation between “personalities from many different walks of life” (read: famous people, kinda) and psychoanalysts.

So who else will be chatting in this series? David Byrne is doing one, of course, as well as Charlie Kaufman, Albert Maysles, Sarah Silverman, Gloria Vanderbilt, and more.

For the full list of “personalities”/psychoanalysts go here and grab available tickets here.

Billy Corgan made a massive announcement just moments ago about his plans for the next Smashing Pumpkins album. Starting around Halloween of this year, Corgan says he plans to release one song at a time for free online of a 44-song album called Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. “There will be no strings attached. Free will mean free,” he says, but for fans interested in getting an exclusive physical product, 11 4-song EPs, aka “mini-box sets,” will be put up for sale.

Think a 44-song album is too ambitious? Recording of the first four songs just began yesterday in Chicago and Corgan says that 53 songs have already been written for possible inclusion on Teargarden by Kaleidyscope.

Just when I thought double albums were starting to disappear, here we have a quadruple album. Damn, that 19-year-old drummer is a lucky kid.

**Update: Hipsters United says Corgan and producer Kerry Brown hinted (on Dave Navarro’s radio show) the following song will be the first single:

I’m staying way out of this one, as I’m a big fan of both Pitchfork and Billy Corgan (not to mention, our last pro-SP post got TwentyFourBit a cool shout-out from Dave Navarro), but it looks like Corgan doesn’t heart P4K as much as us or, say, Bono. Check out this quote from Corgan in an interview with Shockhound (via HU):

“He’s a good person and great drummer; better that than a great drummer and a shit person,” Corgan said of 19-year-old Smashing Pumpkins drummer Mike Byrne. “He gives me hope for his generation. He’s coming from a world that’s willing to look beyond all the Pitchfork crap and get back to good music.”

Perhaps he’s just fuming about being shut out of P4K’s Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s, but like I said before, I’m steering clear of this one.