famously fractured relationships with his family, friends, and bandmembers." Melissa Auf der Maur commented upon news of the group's reunion, "Everyone knows Billy doesn't need too many people to make a Pumpkins record, other than Jimmy [Chamberlin]—who he has on board." In a 2015 interview Corgan himself referred to the current iteration of the band "as sort of an open source collective" noting that "It's whoever feels right at the time." Many of Corgan's lyrics for the Pumpkins are cathartic expressions of emotion, full of personal musings and strong indictments of himself and those close to him. Music critics were not often fans of Corgan's angst-filled lyrics. Jim DeRogatis wrote in a 1993 Chicago Sun-Times article that Corgan's lyrics "too often sound like sophomoric poetry", although he viewed the lyrics of later albums Adore and Machina as an improvement. The band's songs have been described as "anguished, bruised reports from Billy Corgan's nightmare-land" by journalist William Shaw. Smashing Pumpkins, unlike many alternative rock bands at the time, disavowed the influence of punk rock on their sound. Overall, they have a diverse, densely layered, and guitar-heavy sound, containing elements of gothic rock, heavy metal, dream pop, psychedelic rock, progressive rock, shoegazing, and electronica in later recordings. The Smashing Pumpkins' distinctive sound up until Adore involved layering numerous guitar tracks onto a song during the recording process, a tactic that Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness coproducer Flood called the "Pumpkin guitar overdub army." Although there were a lot of overdubbed parts on Gish, Corgan began to really explore the possibilities of overdubbing with Siamese Dream; Corgan has stated that "Soma" alone contains up to 40 overdubbed guitar parts. While Corgan knew many of the songs would be difficult or impossible to replicate from their recorded versions in concert (in fact, some songs were drastically altered for live performance), he has explained the use of overdubbing by posing the question "When you are faced with making a permanent recorded representation of a song, why not endow it with the grandest possible vision?" This use of multilayered sounds was inspired by Corgan's love of 1970s popular artists and bands such as David Bowie, Cheap Trick, Queen, Boston, and the Electric Light Orchestra, as well as shoegaze, a British alternative rock style of the late 1980s and early 1990s that relied on swirling layers of guitar noise for effect. Mellon Collie coproducer Alan Moulder