Billy Corgan Gets Emotional After Reuniting With ‘Siamese Dream’ Cover Girls
Not only did the Smashing Pumpkins announce their own return last week, but the band instigated another reunion: that of Ali Laenger and LySandra Roberts, the two young girls featured on the cover of their 1993 breakthrough album Siamese Dream.
A quarter of a century later, the band brought Laenger and Roberts back together to recreate those childhood images featured on the cover. The women appeared in a tour-announcement video, prompting a gush of emotion from frontman Billy Corgan, who wrote about the occasion on Instagram.
"On such a special day in SP history, I want to take a moment to thank Ali and LySandra, who you might know were the little girls that I stood by and watched have their picture taken some 23 years ago (on what was a perfect LA afternoon)," he wrote. "Never realizing that this moment in time would forever tie us, and go on to become such an iconic image in rock history. What's amazing is their chemistry with one another still leaps through the camera to this day and yet if memory serves they'd never met before that Siamese shoot. Which tells me their coming together, and the beauty that Melodie's shot captures, of youth and innocence, was meant to be SP's own, personal lucky star. So thank you thank you thank you Ali and LySandra, we adore you, and having you be a part of today's launch brings tears to my eyes. For life goes fast, and I can still see you in my mind's eye wearing crisp white dresses in a stranger's backyard, looking like little Mother Mary's, smiling and laughing into the sun."
The Smashing Pumpkins' official reunion tour comes after months of teasing, and on the heels of an acrimonious and massively publicized split with founding bassist D'Arcy Wretsky, during which she and Corgan have repeatedly accused each other of lying and manipulation.