Billy Corgan Plans Cross-Country Documentary, Hopes to Write New Album Along the Way

Billy Corgan is about to embark on an ambitious new project that may very well inspire the Smashing Pumpkins’ next album.

In a post to his blog, People and Their Cars, Corgan reveals he will soon head out on a road trip across the U.S. with a friend in search of the country’s history. It’s a journey the Pumpkins leader plans to film for an upcoming documentary, and he’s crowdsourcing advice to determine where they should go and who they should see:

My mate Justin and I are set to head out and chart the beginnings of a new documentary I'm aching to make about America. And as we meet strangers and friends in living rooms and backyards and porches, and near campfires and rusting trolleys, we'll need your help of where to go and what we must see. If that intrigues you, and you or yours have family along our route, we'd like you to contact us with good heart. For we'll need help and support to make this work as I imagine it in my mind. To sketch at least the beginnings of a project that may be so vast it'll take much more than a 3 week roustabout to understand.

Corgan says he hopes to write a follow-up to the band’s 2014 full-length Monuments to an Elegy along the way.

Corgan’s trip comes just ahead of the Pumpkins’ acoustic-electro In Plainsong tour. In the post, the singer offered some more details for those gigs, saying the band will play “a suite of Siamese Dream songs” and “tunes from Zwan and the Future Embrace, and maybe even [one] or two I’ve helped others write.”

Read Corgan’s entire outline for his new documentary right here.