Billy Corgan sees a benefit in the age difference between him and wife Chloé Mendel. “And then her youth was an advantage because she hadn’t been wounded like so many people are,” he said while discussing their relationship.
The Smashing Pumpkins frontman made the comments during an October 22 appearance on The New York Times‘ Popcast, as PEOPLE reported. Hosts Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli asked whether coming from different generations had helped the couple.
Corgan, 59, and Mendel, 34, began dating in 2012 after meeting through a mutual friend. He was in his 40s, while she was still a teenager.
Mendel works in fashion as CEO and co-creative director of House of Gilles, the label she launched with her father, designer Gilles Mendel. She and Corgan also operate Madame ZuZu’s, a tea shop and performance space in Highland Park, Illinois.
Corgan Says He and His Previous Partners Both Carried Emotional Wounds
Corgan initially joked about not wanting to upset feminists. He then credited feminism with changing women’s expectations and said women of his own generation often had to cope with abuse without adequate support.
He recalled being shocked by experiences that former partners shared with him. As he explained the difficulty of building a relationship when both people were hurting, he included himself in that description instead of assigning the problems entirely to the women.
“There was nothing wrong with them,” he said, according to Us Weekly. With Mendel, he described encountering a different sense of self-confidence and an openness to love. He also credited her with accepting him as he was when they met.
In a March 2025 interview with PEOPLE, Corgan said he had wanted children since his late 20s. After successive unsuccessful relationships, however, he had begun to question whether family life was possible for him.
Their Wedding Became Part of ‘Adventures in Carnyland’
Corgan proposed on Mendel’s 30th birthday in September 2022. They married at their Highland Park home the following September, with their two older children standing as witnesses. Mendel told Vogue that the house was also where both children had been born.
The ceremony appeared in Billy Corgan’s Adventures in Carnyland, the eight-episode reality series released in 2024. Alongside the wedding preparations, it followed Corgan’s touring commitments and his work running the National Wrestling Alliance.
In a joint interview with TV Insider that May, Corgan said the production company initially approached him about a show before learning that he was getting married. He persuaded Mendel to let the cameras attend by presenting it as a chance to have more footage of the day.
“I just said as long as they weren’t in the way of any of my shots,” Mendel recalled. Discussing the broader series, she said she wanted viewers to see their everyday lives and the work involved in running a small company.
Three Children Changed How Corgan Thinks About Touring
The couple welcomed son Augustus Juppiter in November 2015 and daughter Philomena Clementine in October 2018. Their youngest daughter, Juno Delphine, arrived in March 2025, when Corgan was 58.
At the Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony in New York on June 11, 2026, he told Us Weekly that Juno had started talking. “She’s a titanic force,” he said of the family’s newest member.
Fatherhood had also changed how he evaluated work commitments. Corgan said music once occupied so much of his attention that his focus became unhealthy. Now, an invitation to leave home prompted a practical question: “OK, if I’m going to go away from my family, why am I going away?”
During his earlier PEOPLE interview, he described Mendel occasionally calling while he was on tour to announce that she and the children were flying out the next day. Those visits could last only a couple of days, fitted around the family’s competing schedules.
Corgan has also taken the older children on the road without a nanny. In a July 2025 interview with GRAMMY.com, he explained that those trips came with a rule, the children had to join him onstage. “They usually come out and dance during one song,” he said.