Today's #YearlongMixtape is a twofer - two songs from Smashing Pumpkins' 1995 double album "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness." (I can't believe it's almost 20 years old!) I had the album on cassette and I'm pretty sure I wore it out.
I was in college and getting more into rock music, after listening almost exclusively to pop, dance, and hip hop throughout most of high school. In my admittedly limited exposure to rock/grunge, Smashing Pumpkins and Billy Corgan's songwriting blew my mind. At the risk of sounding like a snobby music critic, they were more musically ambitious than anyone I'd heard to that point. This was pre-U2 fandom for me, but I think Smashing Pumpkins expanded my musical tastes so that I was prepared for U2 when the time was right, if that makes sense. In fact, U2's frequent engineer and producer Flood co-produced this album.
Mellon Collie was divided into two parts, and the first was called "Dawn to Dusk." This is their "angry" song, and it spoke to a part of me I had not yet fully experienced.
"And what do I get, for my pain?
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game."
The other #YearlongMixtape song is from part two of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, called "Twilight to Starlight."
I love the orchestral Smashing Pumpkins songs, like Disarm and Tonight, Tonight. Who else writes songs like this? Especially in 1995, when so much of the popular music was horrible. "Thirty-three" is one of those breathtaking songs that I listened to over and over. The tone is hopeful, the exact opposite of Bullet with Butterfly Wings.
"I know I'll make it, love can last forever,
Graceful swans of never topple to the earth,
And you can make it last, forever you..."
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