Billy Corgan reveals the Smashing Pumpkins song he wants played at his funeral

Posted On April 7, 2025April 7, 2025

The Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has revealed that he would like their song ‘To Sheila’ to be played at his funeral.

The track appeared as the opening song on the grunge band’s fourth album, Adore, which was released in 1998. Despite the title ‘To Sheila,’ Corgan didn’t write the song with a specific person in mind; it was an entirely fictional story which came to him while on tour.

During a new interview with The Guardian, Corgan explained why he would pick it as his funeral song, noting, “I’d probably pick one of my own just to make some sort of posthumous, bitter point: ‘You should have paid more attention to me when I was here.’ ‘To Sheila’ from the Adore album by Smashing Pumpkins would be a good one, if you’re sitting there, mourning my loss.”

In the liner notes of the 2014 reissue of Adore, Corgan delved into the story behind the song which was written while the Smashing Pumpkins were on the road in Poland.

Corgan elaborated on the song’s genesis: “The first take on the first day of the album, and the song that trumpeted in softly a new era; or what was the final era; or the end of the only era; or the beginning of this era. Either way, the melody and simplicity of chords presented is both a coming and going; or better said, a door in and out. There was no Sheila, but if she does exist somewhere beyond the limits of my imagination I imagine her to be Gaelic.”

In the same interview with The Guardian, Corgan also revealed the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Zero’ was the last song he attempted to sing at karaoke, sharing, “I thought it would be funny to sing my own song, but the longer it went, the more I performed it like I was on stage in front of 50,000 people, and the less people thought it was funny.”

This summer, the Smashing Pumpkins are set to play a series of outdoor dates in the United Kingdom which will see them visit London, Halifax, Scarborough and Colchester.

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