QOTSA guitarist Troy Van Leeuwan has reminisced on an exchange he had with Billy Corgan in the mid-90s, in which Corgan proclaimed that rock music is dead.
Leeuwan recently sat down with Guitar Player Magazine, in an interview that covered QOTSA, his involvement with Maynard James Keenan’s side-project, A Perfect Circle and Billy Corgan.
The guitarist recalled a particular interaction he had with Billy Corgan that saw the Smashing Pumpkins frontman decry the state of guitar music.
“I remember, it was like the mid-’90s or something, I remember Billy Corgan was saying, ‘Rock guitar is dead’ ’cause all this electronic music was coming out,” the QOTSA rocker shared.
Leeuwan went on to wax lyrical about all the nuanced magic of guitar, that can’t be recreated with other instruments.
“And I was like, ‘I just don’t see it.’ The guitar is such a unique instrument, people like it because it’s, like, the way it’s tuned is so not intuitive to what a piano is or any other instrument,” he continued.
“And it’s so imperfect – there’s imperfections in the guitar that you can’t mimic with other instruments. I just never bought it.
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“Even though I program drums all day long and I produce stuff – the new Gone Is Gone stuff is very electronic, but there’s guitar in everything.”
Troy Van Leeuwan’s dedication to the mighty axe comes as no surprise. Back in October, guitar giants Fender unveiled their collaboration with the Queens of the Stone Age guitarist, a Jazzmaster in a Copper Age colourway.
Elsewhere during the interview, Leeuwan delved into his involvement with A Perfect Circle. “I joined the band kind of halfway through that record [2000’s Mer de Noms],” he explained.
“On that record, I’m playing – mainly you can hear my playing on ‘Thinking of You,’ I do the solo on that. And I think ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is another one. It was 20 years ago.”
“On the second record [2003’s Thirteenth Step], I played on a bunch of more songs too, but yeah, the first record, I kind of, right at the tail end of that was finished when I joined the band.”
