Zwan
|
|
It featured:
- Billy Corgan (vocals/guitar), formerly of The Smashing Pumpkins.
- Matt Sweeney (guitar), formerly of the bands Chavez and Skunk. He has also played with Cat Power and Guided By Voices, and collaborated with Will Oldham on an album.
- David Pajo (guitar), formerly of Slint, also the driving force behind Papa M. He has also played with Tortoise, Stereolab, Royal Trux and Will Oldham.
- Paz Lenchantin (bass), also of A Perfect Circle. She has also played with Papa M.
- Jimmy Chamberlin (drums), formerly of The Smashing Pumpkins.
Following the breakup of the Smashing Pumpkins, Corgan and Chamberlin joined forces with Sweeney to start Zwan. Sweeney recruited Pajo, and the band debuted as a four-piece in late 2001. Lenchantin completed the group in spring 2002.
Widely seen as a vehicle for Corgan's prolific songwriting, Zwan used an intricate three-guitar attack to craft a sound often compared to that of the Smashing Pumpkins album Siamese Dream, albeit more melodic and shot through with an upbeat gentleness. Zwan performed about 50 new original Corgan songs on its several brief, acclaimed tours, but released only one studio album. The album was largely viewed as a disappointed for various reasons, including: poor quality, not meeting expectations set by prior Smashing Pumpkins albums, being less than the sum of its parts talent-wise, and poor production quality that Billy Corgan claimed was designed to "sound like vinyl".
| Contents |
Zwan's breakup
In the May 27, 2005 edition of Entertainment Weekly, Billy Corgan gave his version of the reasons behind Zwan's breakup.
- Q: Why did it implode?
- A:Sex and drunks and junk. Tick off the list: heroin, band members having relationships; one of the band members sleeping with the producer's girlfriend while we were making the album. You don't trust the person next to you. I'm on the bus. I send an email to somebody and I throw my BlackBerry in my little day bag. The next day, my ex-girlfriend calls me screaming. Somebody in the group went into my BlackBerry and forwarded her an email that another girl sends me. I mean, that's he kind of stuff we were dealing with.
- ["Pretty much everything that he said has been exaggerated and blown out of propertion," Pajo responds. "The drug stuff in particular. I know there was no heroin." Adds Lenchantin, "I believe that we were a really good team. I am moving on and onward. I hope that our paths will meet again in peace." Sweeney declined to comment.]
Discography
Albums
- Mary Star of the Sea (January 2003) #3 US, #4 Canada, #33 UK (February 2003 release)
Singles
External links
- The Zwan/B0lly Database (http://zwan.mg2.org)
- VH1 Biography (http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/zwan/bio.jhtml)de:Zwan