Teargarden By Kaleidyscope was one of the most ambitious album projects conceived by the Smashing Pumpkins only for it to be abandoned, so we asked Jimmy Chamberlin what happened to it.
The Smashing Pumpkins have never been short on ambition when it comes to their music. But of all the wild experimentations undertaken by Billy Corgan over the years, his planned Teargarden By Kaleidyscope album project was perhaps the band’s most ambitious.
Originally envisioned as a 44-song concept album based around the “Fool’s journey” from the Tarot and harkening back to the “original psychedelic roots of the Smashing Pumpkins,” each song was to be released individually as a free download over a few years before being packaged into four limited-edition EPs. When the entire album was finished, every song was to be put into a deluxe box set to go on sale.
It was hugely ambitious project that started in 2009 and adhered to this unique format before being reworked partway through towards a more traditional album release with the release of 2012’s Oceania and 2014’s Monuments To An Elergy – both which were considered to be albums within the larger scope of the Teargarden project.
But by 2018, 34 songs into the project’s planned 44-song run, Billy had decided to abandon the Teargarden album and move onto the next Smashing Pumpkins thing. So the big question is what happened to it? Why was the project cancelled 10 songs before the end?
Having talked to drummer Jimmy Chamberlin about the Smashing Pumpkins’ latest album, Cyr, and the upcoming sequel to the band’s greatest album, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, I simply had to ask what happened to Teargarden By Kaleidyscope.
“I think sometimes those things start off in one incarnation and things change when gets impossible to fulfill them [the original vision],” says Jimmy. “You can’t make people care about stuff, right? You can lead the horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”
And that’s the double-edged sword of being hugely ambitious – sometimes people just don’t care as much as you hoped and that seems like what happened with Teargarden By Kaleidyscope.
The Smashing Pumpkins drummer also suggested that another potential reason for Teargarden‘s cancellation was the inability of people to hang with Billy’s ambitious vision for the project, as well as wanting to work on other things.
“Billy is a very ambitious songwriter and a very ambitious person, as am I, we’re both have lots of shit going on at all times,” says Jimmy. “In addition to music, I got a tonne of business stuff and I sit on a couple of school boards.”
“Him and I spin at a really high frequency and a lot of people just can’t hang with that shit, we have a 32-year history of people who flamed out because it was just too intense.”
Teargarden By Kaleidyscope may well have been the Smashing Pumpkins’ crowning glory had things gone to plan. But as it so happens, it’s become yet another one of music’s most ambitious projects that ultimately didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
