Celine is one of the most beloved performers in the world. Having broken attendance records with her Vegas shows, she’s also created a wardrobe of successful fragrances over the past decade. She sat down with Dave in New York for a candid discussion about perfume, family and beauty.
Dave: What’s the best thing about being famous?
Celine: The best thing about being famous is I arrived last night in New York City and asked for eight tickets to Lion King tonight for my son to go and see the show and it was possible.
Dave: What’s the worst thing about being famous?
Celine: I asked for eight tickets to go see the Lion King and I can’t go because I’m busy (laughs), No, I don’t know. It depends how you see things, you know. It can be that everything I might say for the worst thing can be nothing for some people. For example, for many people to be a little a sick and to be home isn’t a big deal. But those people may not have a job that you have to use a vocal instrument. For me to get congested or feel sick is very dramatic. When my sinuses and my throat and my lungs are not well, it becomes dramatic. I wish I could become a guitar player. When my guitar strings are not there I can just change them.
I recently had a micro-plasma pneumonia and it is very hard to find. But it’s very easy to cure. As a singer you say you have bronchitis because it’s easier for people to understand. It’s not my style to cancel shows. It’s not fun to be sick, and it’s so hard to cancel a show. I still enjoy what I’m doing, and I know how much involvement it took for them to come. It’s a whole experience coming to one of my shows.
Dave: What are your first memories of scent?
Celine: I remember buying for myself, Chanel No.5. Five has become over the years, and I don’t know why, my lucky number. And because it was perfume with the number five in it, Chanel No. 5, then it had to be my perfume. I was very interested, like everyone, in Marilyn Monroe. And I saw a picture once when I was a teenager of Marilyn Monroe in bed wearing Chanel No. 5 and I started practicing that every night. I was sitting in bed, spraying Chanel. And then when I started to have a crush and he was wearing Polo Ralph Lauren all of the time, I started spraying my pillow with it.
Dave: You’ve created many successful fragrances. What is it is about fragrance you find most interesting?
Celine: My dad has passed a number of years ago and it happens still today that I smell him. His smell: It comes out of nowhere so strongly. I don’t even know if it was the cologne of my dad but it his cologne or whatever he was wearing, his own smell mixed with that, his personality, it is very difficult to describe. Like the smell of child, it’s very hard to describe. My mom is also like that. She has her own smell: breath, saliva, sweat mixed with whatever perfume she wears. It is something very unique to her. I’m finding with time that, I wish to find my own signature scent. I know a few people who have been wearing the same perfume for years. You put their coat in the closet and their scarf smells of their scent, their coat smells of it. And if you go to their house, it smells of it. You think of them and you know how they smell. I find this so interesting. I wish one day I could find my own scent. Me, I’m still following fashion.
I think perfume is such a comfort zone. I love when my son comes home and he says, “Oh mom, I missed your smile and your smell.”
Dave: I read that you don’t wear fragrance when performing.
Celine: When I sing I don’t not wear perfume. For example, when the stage crew uses Purell and I put the microphone close to my nose, it’s too strong and I kind of gag. It does that to me. The alcohol comes out even if it’s very soft. They used to do these things to make me feel fancy – they’d clean the microphone in case there is lipstick or something on it, and they’ll clean it with a product that had like cinnamon in it or something and it was just too strong. Or, you know there are like 40 dancers on stage and they are all wearing their favourite smell, and I’ll be singing something like “Seduces Me.” I sit on a chair and they all come half-dressed near me, sweating, smelling their own thing, their own scent – it’s a great bouquet. But I just stand there and look and enjoy, but I can’t perform. It’s too overwhelming for my vocal chords. My nose inhales that strongly and then I can’t project
Dave: Is there a childlike appeal to beauty?
Celine: You know, my son was very interested in scent and beauty as a child. He would very often look in my drawer and smell things. I’m keeper and I try perfumes and beauty products. It’s fun, it’s fun! He’d go through my old makeup box and he’d say, “Can I paint your face mom?” The love for a mother for a child and a child for a mother is so amazing and so strong.
Dave: What do you treasure most?
Celine: My family, oh gosh, my mom. I can’t wait. We have a few celebrations for the holidays we always do a big party every year for my family. Believe it or not my mother, Therese, is cooking for all of us and we are almost 180. She wants to cook. And we have a golf course in Quebec. We have two 18-holes, so we are equipped with a room to fit everybody and we have a big kitchen in the back with a chef there during the year helps us, so my mom’s there and she helps them and she’ll say, “Ok, now it’s ready, don’t put that there, help me to do this.” She does half of it at her house before, so she’ll prepare the meat pies and put them in the freezer and all her sweet relish, like ketchup, homemade ketchup, she prepares it all in advance. And I told her, “You don’t’ you think this is a little much,” and she said, “No, this is my gift. And I want to do it. And we’re gonna have a holiday this year just the brothers and sisters, no companions, no children. Just the brothers and sisters at my mom’s place, and she’ll be cooking again, I guess. And we’ll have a gift-exchange between us.
Dave: It must be hard to be away from your family for so long when you tour.
Celine: I’m so used to it. I mean, I don’t want to be. And the hardest part is when I’m home and I don’t want to leave. But, my mom comes to visit quite a lot. And every time we go on vacation I bring her. So I don’t wait 3 months, or 6 months before seeing my mother. The rest of my family, some members work with me on tour so I see some of them, but of course I miss them. But, I started to travel and tour so young that I think I got used to that routine of seeing them every six months. So it became quite normal. And now every time I see them there is like three newborns. So we are 180 now, and we don’t invite like, friends of friends. It’s just brothers and sisters and children, I think we’re up to like 36 nieces and nephews now.
Dave: Do you have your mother’s recipes?
Celine: We have plans for her to show me – I love to cook. I don’t get to do it, I mean, I don’t take the time because I don’t have the time, but it’s something that I do enjoy. I remember our first house in Florida, and I wasn’t very very busy and we moved it and I was doing it all, I was cleaning my house and I was cooking because I had time to do so and I so enjoyed every moment of it. In the morning leave the house like that, go play golf and then come in and figure out what we were going to have lunch and dinner and because I wasn’t used to that it became really relaxing to do so. Once it starts to become a routine, then it’s probably another deal. If you do too much of one thing it’s probably becomes a bore. For me to pack and to not be at home, it’s not that much fun.
Dave: Does the touring become for you?
Celine: Let’s say it becomes mental. I mean you have to physically and vocally concentrate, and discipline yourself. Once you do the same thing so much of the time it’s almost like you’re sitting in on it and someone else is doing it. You can’t just sit on adrenaline, you might be surprised that you forget your words and you forget a whole song. You have to be on the edge, sharp, all of the time. When I forget my words, I make them up and make them laugh and think, “Okay, here we go! 150,000 times later.”
Dave: What is your best beauty advice?
Celine: I want them to feel strong about themselves. A lot of people underestimate themselves. Not a lot of people say things like “Oh, you look good” or “thank you for helping me.” Every woman should feel she is important that she makes a difference and that she is loved. That’s success, you know, feeling good. And for those women that don’t get the chance to hear these things, I hope they find someone who they can relate to and feel strong. I want them to feel strong about who they are.
ON THE RISE
It was the beginning of 1996 when an up and coming alternative group called the Smashing Pumpkins set out on a global run in support of their latest release, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” One of the earliest dates brought them to Los Angeles for a packed performance at the legendary Palace Theatre, where fans filled the venue wall to wall. Instead of opening with the loud, abrasive energy that dominated alternative rock the year before, the band surprised everyone by beginning with a quiet piano performance.
The song was the album’s title track, a deeply reflective piece filled with emotion, optimism and the feeling of stepping into a new chapter. Billy Corgan, who was 28 at the time, wrote it while teaching himself how to play piano.
Corgan recalls the moment feeling almost unreal, surrounded by the Palace Theatre’s velvet drapes, the gentle melody and the overwhelming excitement from the crowd. Then everything erupted as pounding drums and roaring guitars crashed into the room, fully introducing the massive soundscape of “Mellon Collie.”
Three decades later, “Mellon Collie” is widely viewed as one of the defining rock records of the 1990s, later inspiring artists such as Muse, My Chemical Romance and Silversun Pickups. The album marked a dramatic turning point for the band, who had previously become known for the dreamy, progressive leaning sound of their 1993 breakthrough “Siamese Dream.” Unlike that record, “Mellon Collie” arrived as an ambitious concept double album, with lyrics tracing a journey that Corgan described as “one day that can represent your entire life.”
Throughout that concept, the record shifts through crushing and emotional examinations of rage and identity on tracks like “Muzzle,” “Zero” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” nostalgic and delicate moments in “Cupid De Locke” and “Thirty-Three,” and themes of youth and romance in “1979” and “Love.” Its enormous range in both storytelling and musical direction made it stand apart from other rock albums of its era, abandoning the detached attitude often associated with grunge in favor of sincerity, emotion and experimentation.
Taking cues from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” the noisy textures of Sonic Youth, the symbolic songwriting and layered arrangements of Black Sabbath, along with surreal visual art influences, “Mellon Collie” pushed the Smashing Pumpkins further than ever before. The album challenged the group to discover how far they could stretch creatively and how completely they could capture human emotion within a single project.
To celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary, the band has partnered with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, their hometown orchestra, to reinterpret “Mellon Collie” as an opera production. They are also releasing the album again alongside previously unheard recordings from the 1996 “Infinite Sadness” tour. Featuring performances from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, the recordings preserve the intensity of the live shows and document a defining chapter in the band’s story.
In “Tonight, Tonight,” Corgan reflects, “And our lives are forever changed, we will never be the same.”
Looking back at the legacy of “Mellon Collie,” those lyrics feel hauntingly accurate. “Nothing was quite the same after this album,” Corgan told the Times. In many ways, that statement could not be more true.
The album earned seven Grammy nominations and launched the band into another level of fame through massive MTV exposure and a series of enduring hit singles. Away from the spotlight, however, Corgan was struggling through the collapse of his first marriage. During the tour, growing tensions inside the group eventually exploded following the overdose death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. Later that same year, Corgan also lost his mother.
What followed “Mellon Collie” and the turbulent 1996 tour was a period filled with instability and upheaval. Yet within the life of the album itself existed a rare moment where Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins came together in complete creative harmony to make a record that would ultimately shape their careers and, in many ways, the course of their lives.
Something I really love, especially about the piano and “Tonight, Tonight” as the opening track, is this feeling of hope that it starts off with, or maybe that’s just what I got from it.
[Laughs] It starts with hope and ends somewhere else, let’s put it that way.
What was the intention with starting with this feeling and what was it inspired by at the time?
I was going through a lot in my personal life, and I was grappling with the changes in my life and the awareness that I had in my life, given what I’d been through as a child and now as an adult with success, it was like I was trying to grapple with all that and wondering what really matters.
I think if you look at the general narrative of the album, it starts with the idea and it starts with the dream and what is possible within the dream. So, for example, you pointed to the piano piece that opens the record.
I went to a store, not too far from where I’m sitting and talking to you [he was calling from his car in Chicago], and bought an old 1920s piano with mismatched legs for $2,500. Now that may not seem like a big deal, but at 27 years old, when I was writing the record, I never owned a piano nor was I allowed to play a piano in my relatives’ houses.
So I finally had this moment of, wow, I can actually buy a piano and I can play my own piano in my own house. As silly as that sounds, it had never crossed my mind that way. I’d always lived in apartments and I was always on the road. It was like a new beginning. It starts with the gift that I gave myself and that ends up having a lot of influence on the compositional structure of the record.
And then “Tonight, Tonight,” was a song that we messed around with for about four months. And one night it just came to me in a flash, like what the song needed to sound like, and I went upstairs to this room that I had in my house and I just remember playing it like I could hear the whole orchestra in my head and I thought, OK, that’s what I need to do.
Something I see on this new reissue is that there’s going to be a lot of recordings from that live 1996 tour right after the release of the album. What was it like relistening to these performances, especially as it was the last tour with the band’s full original lineup?
We had crested a particular wave at the time. We had a No. 1 album. We were playing, I think, a 90-date arena tour, which, now there’s a ton of artists playing stadiums, but back then an arena show was essentially the top of the mountain. So then we had success, we had fame, we had money that we’d never had.
With that, we had all the trappings. And I think in the recordings that are on this record that’s coming out, it’s like a light burning bright before it burns out. If you’ve ever had that experience, you’re in a room and all of a sudden the lightbulb gets really intense and then it burns out. So, you hear us basically burning out.
And there’s a sort of incandescent poetic beauty to all that, and there’s just the sorrow to it because you also realize it’s the last of that moment. In many ways, it was truly the end of that band. I mean, yes, the band has continued, and James [Iha] and Jimmy [Chamberlin] and I have been playing back together again for seven years, and released more records and had a tremendous amount of success of late.
But you can never recapture the innocence of youth or the innocence of the time. When you combine those types of experiences with loss and sorrow and the knowledge of what didn’t happen or what could have happened, then it makes revisiting this time bittersweet.
What do you think “Mellon Collie” means today and how has it been for you to see younger generations continue to be inspired by it?
I view that album in particular very much within the realm of a child who grows up in a latchkey situation. It’s very much a Gen X term. Latchkey kids were those whose parents were working a lot or not home, so they grew up by and large unsupervised. So what does a kid who grows up unsupervised do? They watched a lot of television, and then we consumed a lot of sugar and got up to a lot of delinquent-type things.
So I think the album is very representative of that experience and I think why it continues to resonate for subsequent generations is, it’s very dissociative. Back in the ’90s, the mainstream culture, including the L.A. Times and the New York Times, they really struggled with, “Where’s this all coming from?” Now you are living in a world that is constantly dissociative thanks to social media.
The thing that’s surprising, I’m basing it on personal conversations I’ve had with tons of musicians through the years, is that our album gave some musicians the permission to pursue a wider artistic vision. Because “Mellon Collie” is so wide. It has so much breadth. So what I’ve heard from other artists is, “Wow, when I heard that album, I thought, I can do this too, but in my own way.” And that to me is like, that’s a penultimate compliment from another musician. It’s really humbling.
The greatest thrill now is seeing that young people really do connect with the record. And they connect with songs that are different from the previous generations, which is even cooler. They seem to like the weirder stuff on it rather than the ... let’s call it, the classic rock alternative stuff.
That’s a cool way of looking at it. Like the previous generation probably was really obsessed with “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and maybe newer listeners aren’t as focused on that song specifically. In that song, it’s interesting that you say, “Can you fake it for just one more show?” Or this feeling of putting on a performance and feeling that you have to fake it as an artist. Is that something that still resonates with you?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because you work so hard to be on that stage and then, as Roger Waters so aptly describes in “The Wall,” you find yourself having a surrealist experience on that same stage. You put yourself through hell to get there and then one day you’re standing there and you’re like, what am I doing here?
I’ve had similar moments where I’m standing on stage and you feel like you’re tripping on drugs, but you’re totally sober. Because the thing that you love inverts on you. When I was a kid, I thought being on TV was a peak thing. But then I was there, about to perform on TV, and there were all these things going on, like you’re tired, or you’re being sued or your bandmate doesn’t like the deli tray. And I just thought, what am I doing here? I felt like I was living in “Spinal Tap.” This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be glamorous. This is supposed to be a thousand other things that you put on the rock-star checklist and you find yourself saying, I don’t want to be here.
If you turn to your friends or your family and say, “I’m really struggling with how I’m supposed to process the information that I’m receiving up here,” you’re told you’re ungrateful or you’re out of your mind or you really need to check your ego. I reached a point where it was like, no, I don’t have the skill set to survive punishing my mind, body, spirit five to six nights a week in front of strangers singing songs that are very personal to me and I hear the cheering and I see the flash bulbs popping, but I’m so numb that I can’t feel what’s happening. So in a lot of ways, that song and the themes from the album are still real.
You’ve said in the “Mellon Collie” sessions, you guys were working on 50 songs at once, that you’re working for six hours a day, just really intense in the studio. What are your thoughts as you think back to that? Were there any memories that really arise for you?
Despite our public persona of being dysfunctional and brawling, we were quite quiet in the rehearsal space. We almost never had guests and 97% of the time, it was just the four of us in a room working.
So, the real memory for me is just day after day after day of trying tons and tons of different ideas, and it started to wind itself into a story through those 60-plus songs, many of which came out in those few years. It was our best period of musical alignment and I think you can hear that. We worked very hard and very peacefully together for eight months to put all that together.
We had just come off a tour, “Siamese Dream,” which was a 14-month tour, and we went in the studio for eight months, made the “Mellon Collie” record, and we immediately went back on tour. And that tour was 22 months long. So when you ask my memory from that time, it’s like, can you describe the blur? It was a really beautiful blur, you know?
You said something really interesting earlier about “Tonight, Tonight” coming to you with the sound of an orchestra. Talk about what it was like to see that song and this album come to life as an opera with Chicago Lyric.
The idea that I would even not only write something on the piano, and now, a full orchestra is playing that song here in Chicago with the lyrics I wrote ... is totally mind-blowing. The first time I heard it with an orchestra, I started to cry, because I thought, this is so crazy. This song that I used to teach myself how to play the piano was now being played by some of the greatest musicians in the world in this beautiful opera hall. I can’t explain to you the strangeness of that journey.
I was made fun of [for using classical instruments in ’90s rock music]. It was seen as too precocious or too artsy or too, I don’t know, overly grand. And now, if you look at alternative music, I mean, there’s been an absolute explosion of people using unconventional instrumentation within the breath of alternative music, as it should be. So it makes me laugh now that there was a time where somehow that was pseudo-controversial.
Coming to my last question for you, how did this album impact your life 30 years later and impact your artistry?
After putting out something like this, artistically it was a triumph. But then publicly it became surreal. We hit a level where people were following you through malls and we were on MTV. It’s not like we had not tasted success, but this was this other stratospheric aspect of success. And something about that album just kind of blew everything wide open.
Family relationships, personal relationships, business relationships, everything just kind of went sideways. I remember thinking nothing was quite the same after that album. Which is true, but it’s not true the way you think it is.
The album has never left my life and is never far away from the conversation. It was never like I put it down and left it behind. Other people won’t let me forget and that’s a good thing because the value holds, and I’ll never forget about it.
