Violet Rays by Smashing Pumpkins

Album: Oceania (2012)

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Songfacts®:

Billy Corgan wrote this as a straight acoustic song. "I had it all mapped out," he told Music Radar, "words, everything on acoustic, and then I got into the studio and it was like, 'This is a really good song - now what?'"

"Actually, now that I think about it, before I even had the song, I had the ascending figure," Corgan continued. "So for a couple months, I would play the demo of that figure and say, 'OK, I've got to write a song around it.' I broke it down to the chords, no rhythm, and then wrote the song melodically around that and reverse-engineered it back into the riffs."
Corgan used a Moog 55 keyboard for the arpeggios. "That's the thing about the old Moogs," he told Music Radar, "they're very musical. If you listen to the Moog 55 on Abbey Road, it almost sounds like classical music."

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