The sunlight pours in on Jeff Schroeder in his meticulously organized Los Angeles home, as we talk about the current and future chapters in the life of the former longtime guitarist for The Smashing Pumpkins.
Even over Zoom there’s an air of calm resolve as we discuss his post-Pumpkins journey, including his new music with Chromatics’ founding member Adam Miller’s Inner Magic project. From 2007 to 2023, Schroeder was in the Pumpkins’ substantial run that gave us Oceania, one of the band’s all-time best albums, and a variety of notable world tours. (During this time, James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin would return to the band, too.) How two people from vastly different bands of vastly different reasons for fame — 1990s alt-rock powerhouse on one side and Drive and Twin Peaks on the other — comes down to their shared interest in the particular work of guitarists like kosmische/krautrock maestro Michael Rother and Factory Records stalwart Vini Reilly (of The Durutti Column).
“It’s somewhat of a strange, almost lost genre of instrumental guitar rock that offered a different take than the Steve Vai/Joe Satriani type of thing — which I come from and appreciate, too,” Schroeder told Vehlinggo recently, not long before the release of Inner Magic’s debut single, “Underground,” with former Chromatics frontwoman Ruth Radelet joining Miller on vocals. “But I really love Vini Reily’s and Michael Rother’s solo work. Those records have influenced me immensely.”
Over the course of our chat we covered a bunch of territory, including Schroeder’s background in academics and how he joined the Pumpkins; his introduction to Miller; and the work they’re doing now while navigating a very different music industry; among other things. (Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Additionally, check out the video for “Underground” below.)
Vehlinggo: It’s pretty fascinating that you and Miller found each other. You both have this interest in the same intricate, fluid type of guitar playing that wasn’t the main attraction for fans of either of your noteworthy bands. How did you guys meet?
Jeff Schroeder: I knew about Chromatics, but I wasn’t a huge fan. They came into my world with Twin Peaks [The Return], and I thought it was so cool they were in it. When Adam released Gateway, I liked it because I’m into that type of music and those types of guitar players. And in an early iteration of Inner Magic, my friend Mikael Orr was playing with Adam and so it became a closer circle.
Then, around [late] 2023, I quit The Smashing Pumpkins, and I didn’t know what to do. So I had put together a little project with some friends, and we played a show with Adam in April of 2024. We got to hang out and that was really great. We got along really well.
I brought up an idea: I said you put out Gateway and I put out Metanoia, a solo, kind-of ambient guitar record, and we should play some shows together. In December 2024 we played here in LA at a venue called 2220 Arts. He played his set and I played mine, but I had suggested that we play together at the end. I felt like that would be a nice way to end the evening.
And so we did a version of “Feelin’ Just Fine” by Spacemen 3. It was a lot of fun, and came out so well, that a couple weeks after the show I hit him up and said, “Hey, before it’s too far out of our minds, why don’t we record it? Come over to my house and let’s document it.” I thought it might be something cool to release down the line.
The recording of the Spacemen 3 song went so well that when we finished I asked if he had anything else, and then we just started doing some of his songs and collaborating on that, and it led to what this is now.
I love it. Are you two planning a full-length album?
Yes, I think that’s the plan. But we’re trying to navigate the shifting waters of the music industry, so we’re still looking at the best way to do it. We’ve been working on this record off and on since March 2025. So we definitely have an album’s worth of material at different levels of completion. The idea has always been to put out an album. Our creative brains are wired that way.
But nowadays, the way that people represent work and albums is that once it is actually physically out, it’s the end of the promotional process. It’s really all about the lead-up to the release of the album. I said why don’t we build something over time, and start releasing some singles first. A way to make it fun in an old-school kind of way, where we come from, is to have a B-side with every single that most likely won’t be on the record.
The first single we’re going to come out with is a song called “Underground.” The B-side of that is going to be that Spacemen 3 song, “Feelin’ Just Fine” [with Olive Kimoto on background vocals].
That’s awesome. I can’t wait. So how are you approaching a name for your new project?
So we talked about that, and I really thought that Inner Magic, which was Adam’s band… is such a great name. And this is kind of just the extension of [his project.] It fits with who we are as people, so why make it difficult? The name is already out there. And I have no ego about it. It doesn’t bother me at all that he already used the name in the past.
Not to get too much into turning this into an interview about The Smashing Pumpkins, but it’s worth noting that you took on what could be seen as an impossible role for almost two decades. Taking over for founding members of a very popular band is not easy.
Yes, obviously The Smashing Pumpkins is Billy [Corgan]’s band from both a conceptual and musical perspective, and it appears to have been that way pretty much since the very beginning. And I was totally fine with that, because that was such a new world for me. Working with Adam in Inner Magic thas been all very natural and not forced. But I think that’s the hard thing: You’re trying to enter a new project. People talk about bands and music in the same way that they often talk about romantic relationships: it is a human relationship with its own particular set of dynamics. It is working with other people to try to create something. It’s a private space, an intimate space, at times euphoric but also extremely vulnerable.
Adam and I were both in these very long-term significant relationships in our musical lives. And then one day you find yourself done with it. Then you have to figure out what am I going to do? What am I going to be? Who am I? I’m 15, 20 years older than I was when I started that project. And often that first relationship you start afterward doesn’t end up working out, which is why it’s often called a rebound.
I think maybe we both had our rebound musical relationships; just trying to start something and getting it going. Then reality sets in and you start thinking that this is going to be just as much, if not more work than the previous project. And being older and more mature, sometimes you don’t want to put in that work.
“… What am I going to do? What am I going to be? Who am I?”
We both had to really sit down and think about getting serious, making sure we work really hard on the songwriting, the melodies, the playing, the production. But in all honestly, we have so much fun together, just as friends and hanging out. Unlike what my life with The Smashing Pumpkins had become, our personal lives intersect and we enough points of similarity that we’re able to work together in a manner that feels natural.
I’ve been thinking about your improvisational skills. Metanoia, which you recorded live as part of that Canadian art installation a few years back, feels like you’re having an improvised conversation with the visuals. This happened around the release or after the release of [Smashing Pumpkins] album ATUM, I think? You were getting ready to shift your life’s gears?
It’s completely improvised and I guess you could say it’s a live album. I was asked to play at an outdoor art installation in Toronto over three days. I did seven performances of 40, 45 minutes each. It was exhausting — it really was.
It was a collaboration with the visual artist Krista Kim. I played in front of a large video wall located in Fort York, which was an old military fort that the city was hoping to transform into a space of peace and psychic healing. I was very much into the spirit of what the city was asking both me and Krista to do.
I made sure to record it and it sat there on a hard drive for a couple of years. After I left the band, I thought, “Why don’t I go through and listen to that stuff, and maybe that’ll be a good first solo release.”
It’s ambient, kind of amorphous, and a jarring break from the music of The Smashing Pumpkins, which is something that I actually wanted. I needed a fresh start. I’m sure some people were disappointed or bewildered by the record. I often get the sense that some people would prefer if I did something that was closer in style to The Smashing Pumpkins or even some of my old bands like the Lassie Foundation. That being said, it’s just not where I’m at musically these days.
Is improvisation something you’ve always been able to do or was it something you learned with the Pumpkins?
I’ve always been comfortable improvising, because I am a somewhat schooled musician. I took guitar lessons growing up and studied jazz for a few years while I lived in Chicago. Improvising was normal to me. However, playing solo guitar, that’s something that you have to work on and figure out what technology—if any—you’re going to use to do that.
I’m such a huge fan of Robert Fripp and his Frippertronics and that was more my entry into it. He’s been a big influence on me. Not only as a player, but also as a person. He combines a very specific musical vision with a spiritual one that I find quite inspiring. The more I found out about him, the more I really respect where he comes from.
That’s fantastic. I love Frippertronics. It’s wild what he did without the luxury of digital audio workstation software like ProTools or Logic Pro. However, I suppose someone can just dial up that sound now on one of those apps.
You can sort of but not really emulate it digitally. The sonics of the actual two tape machines [central to Frippertronics] was so distinct and so cool, but there’s also so much more of a limitation with the amount of delay time and repeats: actually having two physical tape machines, and the time, because the reel is ultimately going to finish.
I bought a bunch of his concerts on his website that he’d archived over the years. What he would do a lot of times: One part is him making the loops and then he’d play back the loop and solo over the loop. He’d also bring reels of loops he previously created and solo over those.
Frippertronics is so fascinating to me, because it’s really an exploration of time. You’re slowing time down and you actually get into the process of how it’s made. He’s sitting there recording it, and then you’ve got to stop, and then he’s gonna put the reels back on, and then solo over what he just played.
What appealed to me about it, and what I learned from him was the pleasure of scaling back. For him, King Crimson was such a big machine. And I think because of where he was at personally and spiritually, I think he needed to take a break from being in that band.
Now we’d say about Frippertronics, “Wow, you’ve got to carry all of those huge things around,” but at the time it was a compact touring system for him. So he went and played clubs, record stores, record-company offices — taking this new way to perform and situate it in all different types of contexts. I found that to be very inspiring, because I was in this huge band where it was almost impossible to just get in a room and play music together without it being a massive production.
Right. The Pumpkins are more of an institution than just a band.
Yes, you have to have techs and sound people just to plug in and play, which means that you just don’t unless there’s a monetary reason to get together and play. And obviously, Smashing Pumpkins is not the only band that’s in that position. I think with any band that big it’s something that tends to happen.
I really like the idea that with digital modeling effects and whatnot, I can take one guitar, my Line 6 Helix, and a few other pedals, and I can go play anywhere. I find that liberating.
You’re a few years out from having left that long-term relationship, the big job. Have you noticed any changes in yourself over the past few years? Maybe you notice it in your day-to-day or through your art or something else?
It’s been dramatic. When I made the decision to leave the band, I intellectually understood it, and I knew there was something inside of me emotionally almost demanding that I make the decision. And so I was able to make that decision, but you can only imagine what it’s like to be outside of the bubble that you’ve been living in until you actually do it. Once you hit “send” on the phone and you make the announcement, then what does it mean? It’s taken months, even years to rid my mind of certain attachments to that persona that I had when I was in that band. I think that we do this in all forms of life when we adapt to the situation that we’re in. So whether it’s at work or your partnership with your husband or wife or whatever, a dynamic is created.
Before I joined The Smashing Pumpkins, I actually was on a completely different trajectory.
Right. You were in the academic space. A professor?
Well, I was at UCLA. I was getting a doctorate in comparative literature, and I was going to be a professor. Then this situation came into my world and it was too good of an opportunity to pass up and not explore.
The crazy thing is that it actually happened and then all of a sudden I go from being a graduate student to being in this band. I had to adapt to who I was, what my goals were, because all of a sudden I was in this band that I didn’t start and in a business that I really didn’t know much about.
“… I wouldn’t have given you this answer six months ago.”
It wasn’t like I knew Billy; or Jimmy Chamberlain or James [Iha] or D’arcy [Wretzky], and said, “Hey, let’s start this band together.” For me, my job was to figure out how to fit in within this framework that I didn’t have anything to do with putting together. I loved the band. I was a big fan. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t love the band.
But your perceptions from the outside looking in — of what you think the band is and what the music business is — are very different than when you’re on the inside.
This is something that I’ve only recently come to a realization about: I wouldn’t have given you this answer six months ago. Because I think that over time I realized, oh, this is kind of what that indescribable feeling was: I really didn’t like the person that I became by the end of the situation. Not in a bad way, but it was just more from an artistic standpoint. I was trying to fit in to that structure that was already in lace when I joined the band, but I think I never really fit in. Something just didn’t feel right.
And as I was saying earlier, I had my own dreams and aspirations before I joined the band. I thought to myself that I only have so many years left on this planet; if I’m going to pursue those things, it has to be sooner than later. And so I decided to go.
Inner Magic’s “Underground” single is out now on Bandcamp and Spotify and such.
