YOU LIKE THE SMASHING PUMPKINS??!!!! I just hyperventilated when I saw your ask game answers! I LOOOOVE the Smashing Pumpkins, omg, my favourite fic author likes my favourite band!
Oh, goodness! Um, yes, I do! They were probably my favourite band in high school, especially grade 11! I listened to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness more times than I can even tell you! But then, you see, I went into classical music (opera) and got so heartily tired of listening to any music, ever, when my days were already so overfilled with it, that I stopped ever listening to music except for actual work, or sometimes for the background of writing papers (you can’t beat Renaissance choral music for when you really need to concentrate utterly and never be distracted by lyrics or even the over-interestingness of the music itself, lol). Back in 2002 when I first entered a fandom and had to choose a presence by which to define myself, it was the Harry Potter fandom, and my preference for utter silence while at home - which I should add, also stems from an early lifetime of constant sports-on-TV noise pollution from my father, a sound which is a constant in my parents’ house if he’s home, and which I utterly loathe - as well as my silent lurking without ever commenting (shameful admission now!) and my preference for post-series-era stories is what formed my fandom name of “SilentAuror”. After I lost interest in HP (and its fandom) and wandered off for several years while I was doing my masters and such, it was Benedict’s talent that drew me into Sherlock and suddenly my fingers were itching to write again.
That said, I still almost never listen to music for sheer pleasure. For me, listening to music is an all-or-nothing thing - it’s either the only thing I’m doing, or else it has to be the background to something else. When I left the opera field in 2012, I had to somewhat re-discover the person I was apart from my identity as a singer (and very specifically, my rank among other singers). I moved back to Montréal from Berlin in 2013 to study French in preparation for a new life in Québec City, and I spent that winter and spring allowing myself to cautiously dabble in “real people music” again. In February 2019, I very suddenly became a workout nut, and needed music with good beats to work out to, and getting increasingly bored with the same selection of Imagine Dragons songs - aka the one band I really discovered in 2013 - and finally remembered how much I’d loved the Pumpkins. It started just by needing better workout music, but now that I’m working from home instead of walking laps around museum galleries all day, I take a long walk outside every day, and developed a whole other playlist for non-working-out times. So yeah: to wrap up an extremely rambly story, I’ve essentially just rediscovered the Pumpkins after about 23 years of having ignored them completely. Still love them. :)
