Whether he’s right or wrong, Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman Billy Corgan never thinks small.

The Pumpkins’ 1995 epic “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” remains an alt-rock masterpiece that launched the band with a series of hit singles.

Always musically restless, Corgan expanded his sonic pallet with a symphonic accents in the Pumpkins’ ``Siamese Dreams.’’

While some of Corgan’s more recent projects have been less than successful the man, 45, and a new edition of the Smashing Pumpkins have found their musical fire with their new record “Oceania” releasing Tuesday. “Oceania” currently streaming for free at iTunes.com/SmashingPumpkins) is the band’s 7th studio record and according to Corgan it is “an album within an album.”

Think of it as a suite within the more ambitious and troubled 44-song work-in-progress called “Teargarden By Kaleidoscope.” Speaking about his artistic frustration from his Chicago home Corgan told Dan The Man Press “I wasn’t getting the kind of results I was looking for.’’

The reason, he says, was he’d lost passion for music adding “I knew I had to reinvest myself in my musical life or I needed to get out.’’

What jumpstarted Corgan’s artistry was the accidental death of his pal Mark Tulin, the legendary bassist for the seminal psychedelic rock band Electric Prunes who’d been writing with Corgan.

``Losing Mark [in a scuba accident] made me look at my life and I was shaken. His death woke me up. I have a commitment level to music that hasn’t been there for a long time.”

“I’ve had my success in rock and failures” Corgan says ``what Mark’s passing did was show me you don’t fade away, you have to go out swinging.” Corgan doesn’t fear artistic mortality, with a laugh he says ``I’ve lived and died in rock ’n’ roll a few times, and unfortunately, over the last 10 years I’ve been more dead than alive.”

That self-admitted decade of doom has included the failed alt rock offshoot act Zwan, and a solo record called “Zeitgeist.” ’ The new edition of the Pumpkins, also help recharge Corgan. “This is the band I’ve always wanted” he says. “They’re confident and we like and respect each.”

Very big kudos from a rock star who’s often been accused of being ultra-bossy and dismissive of the musical contributions by his bandmates. “I’m finally in a situation where the band is there for me so I don’t have to do their job for them” Corgan says. “When I was a kid I was scared of failing so I was willing to cover for my band because I thought it was either that or going back to work in the record store. I didn’t care what people thought.”

Recalling the original Smashing Pumpkins Corgan asked “Do you think it was fun being inside on a summer day because I was recording James Iha’s guitar parts, parts he hadn’t even written, parts I had to write for him that people would credit to him? It wasn’t.”

Corgan says this new Pumpkins project is definitely a group effort and how he loathes how “the critics who write about Smashing Pumpkins as if I’m on stage with three mannequins, it’s so disrespectful of these human beings who are committed to the band.”

The words camaraderie and Corgan don’t quite dovetail. Corgan says “I understood when people used to say `the Smashing Pumpkins is really just Billy Corgan,’ but that isn’t the case anymore. The musicians that created “Oceania” are a band, there’s no way I did this all by myself.”

The Early Morning Rebel, a L.A. rock trio, have a plan that has three-chord simplicity and built-in brilliance.

Write some songs. Sign a record contract. And get somebody to listen.

They only raised their Rebel flag last fall and their full length album isn’t due until the end of the summer, yet their single “Life Boat” has had national exposure and they are the must-have music booking at international Fashion Week events.

Some may grumble these rebels without a pause are a flash in the pan and have gotten too much, too soon -- but the apparent overnight success is years in the making.

Josh Mervin, the band’s drums/keys switch-hitter, is the new guy. The two other Rebels, singer Nathan Blumenfeld-James and guitarist Dustin Bath, have been pals and musical partners since freshman year in high school. More than a decade after their graduation, the pair has written and polished an album’s worth of songs including that irresistible ballad “Life Boat” that rescued the boys from obscurity. It’s a moody, atmospheric piece that dissects love and loss.

“Life Boat” is already sailing happily on the internet and it’s gained real chart traction after it was tapped for the music savvy medical TV drama “Grey’s Anatomy.”

In Manhattan on a stop during their inaugural national tour, the band snuggled in a small Lower East Side bar next to the Rockwood Lounge where they were booked.

The Rebels looked perfectly at home decked out in hipster chic. In a half hour, at 6 p.m., they were going to play a late afternoon showcase featuring a handful of their best songs in a semi acoustic format. They were relaxed, but the trio projected a tightly wound energy that was more focus, than butterflies.

According to Nathan the bare bones history of the band is “Dustin and I’ve been writing songs and producing for years, we had other bands and projects but they just didn’t work. About eight months ago we hit a musical wall and we wanted to start totally fresh. That’s when met Josh -- he was the missing part of the puzzle. After we found each other we holed up at our recording studio in Venice and it all just came together.”

Josh admits initially he was wary of the marriage saying “You can’t help but feel a little outside. These guys are best friends with an unbreakable connection. But the LA rock scene is small enough that we knew about each other and when we met we really clicked. I listened to the songs they’d written and I liked what I heard.”

Dustin, the band’s lead guitarist who has an older-than-his-years introspective quality interjected “Josh’s talent was never a question. He’s a really good player, what was really important was his vibe. He seemed like the kind of guy who was going to mesh with us. And that we were going to be able to collaborate with him.”

Dustin added “It’s tough enough being in a band, so you should at least like the people you’re working with.”

For Nathan who’s the principal songsmith for the Early Morning Rebelthat inner-band chemistry is also important because his bandmates are the first line of critics judging his tunes. “You write something and you think it’s good and you have to depend on somebody else to let you know if you’re right” Nathan says.

Both Josh and Dustin smile when Nathan adds “I take criticism well because I try to detach myself from the piece. I try to keep ego out of it. I want to write something that’s bigger, more important than me. I depend on these guys to let me know what will complement the song to make it better."

Then it’s Nathan’s turn to smile saying “It can’t be about sparing my feelings.”

Josh adds “it all about communication for us and a common goal to make a song better. I think we all avoid being negative and we all understand that sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. . . and often, the best ideas comes from collaboration. ”

Despite the band’s desire for strict quality control when it comes to tunes, there was no question about the built-in goodness of the power ballad “Life Boat.”

What is interesting is how such a simple tune has had such varied interpretation of its meaning. “I love that,” says Nathan. “I love that after I write a song it doesn’t really belong to me anymore. It’s owned by the listener and it takes on a unique role in their life. The same song can be about healing to one guy and about a breakup to somebody else. I write from personal experience so my songs have my baggage in them, but I hope the words are universal enough that people see themselves in them.”

As artistically giving as that may sound, on a slightly more selfish level Nathan says he wants to create something that will last longer than he will. “I know that’s partly a need for fame, but as an artist I want to create something that says ‘I was here.’ ”

With “Life Boat” and the rest of their upcoming album. band not only says they’re here, with a rebel yell they declare we’re here to stay.

Excerpts from Jack Whites's NPR Music interview