ON THE RISE
It was the beginning of 1996 when an up and coming alternative group called the Smashing Pumpkins set out on a global run in support of their latest release, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” One of the earliest dates brought them to Los Angeles for a packed performance at the legendary Palace Theatre, where fans filled the venue wall to wall. Instead of opening with the loud, abrasive energy that dominated alternative rock the year before, the band surprised everyone by beginning with a quiet piano performance.
The song was the album’s title track, a deeply reflective piece filled with emotion, optimism and the feeling of stepping into a new chapter. Billy Corgan, who was 28 at the time, wrote it while teaching himself how to play piano.
Corgan recalls the moment feeling almost unreal, surrounded by the Palace Theatre’s velvet drapes, the gentle melody and the overwhelming excitement from the crowd. Then everything erupted as pounding drums and roaring guitars crashed into the room, fully introducing the massive soundscape of “Mellon Collie.”
Three decades later, “Mellon Collie” is widely viewed as one of the defining rock records of the 1990s, later inspiring artists such as Muse, My Chemical Romance and Silversun Pickups. The album marked a dramatic turning point for the band, who had previously become known for the dreamy, progressive leaning sound of their 1993 breakthrough “Siamese Dream.” Unlike that record, “Mellon Collie” arrived as an ambitious concept double album, with lyrics tracing a journey that Corgan described as “one day that can represent your entire life.”
Throughout that concept, the record shifts through crushing and emotional examinations of rage and identity on tracks like “Muzzle,” “Zero” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” nostalgic and delicate moments in “Cupid De Locke” and “Thirty-Three,” and themes of youth and romance in “1979” and “Love.” Its enormous range in both storytelling and musical direction made it stand apart from other rock albums of its era, abandoning the detached attitude often associated with grunge in favor of sincerity, emotion and experimentation.
Taking cues from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” the noisy textures of Sonic Youth, the symbolic songwriting and layered arrangements of Black Sabbath, along with surreal visual art influences, “Mellon Collie” pushed the Smashing Pumpkins further than ever before. The album challenged the group to discover how far they could stretch creatively and how completely they could capture human emotion within a single project.
To celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary, the band has partnered with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, their hometown orchestra, to reinterpret “Mellon Collie” as an opera production. They are also releasing the album again alongside previously unheard recordings from the 1996 “Infinite Sadness” tour. Featuring performances from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, the recordings preserve the intensity of the live shows and document a defining chapter in the band’s story.
In “Tonight, Tonight,” Corgan reflects, “And our lives are forever changed, we will never be the same.”
Looking back at the legacy of “Mellon Collie,” those lyrics feel hauntingly accurate. “Nothing was quite the same after this album,” Corgan told the Times. In many ways, that statement could not be more true.
The album earned seven Grammy nominations and launched the band into another level of fame through massive MTV exposure and a series of enduring hit singles. Away from the spotlight, however, Corgan was struggling through the collapse of his first marriage. During the tour, growing tensions inside the group eventually exploded following the overdose death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. Later that same year, Corgan also lost his mother.
What followed “Mellon Collie” and the turbulent 1996 tour was a period filled with instability and upheaval. Yet within the life of the album itself existed a rare moment where Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins came together in complete creative harmony to make a record that would ultimately shape their careers and, in many ways, the course of their lives.
Something I really love, especially about the piano and “Tonight, Tonight” as the opening track, is this feeling of hope that it starts off with, or maybe that’s just what I got from it.
[Laughs] It starts with hope and ends somewhere else, let’s put it that way.
What was the intention with starting with this feeling and what was it inspired by at the time?
I was going through a lot in my personal life, and I was grappling with the changes in my life and the awareness that I had in my life, given what I’d been through as a child and now as an adult with success, it was like I was trying to grapple with all that and wondering what really matters.
I think if you look at the general narrative of the album, it starts with the idea and it starts with the dream and what is possible within the dream. So, for example, you pointed to the piano piece that opens the record.
I went to a store, not too far from where I’m sitting and talking to you [he was calling from his car in Chicago], and bought an old 1920s piano with mismatched legs for $2,500. Now that may not seem like a big deal, but at 27 years old, when I was writing the record, I never owned a piano nor was I allowed to play a piano in my relatives’ houses.
So I finally had this moment of, wow, I can actually buy a piano and I can play my own piano in my own house. As silly as that sounds, it had never crossed my mind that way. I’d always lived in apartments and I was always on the road. It was like a new beginning. It starts with the gift that I gave myself and that ends up having a lot of influence on the compositional structure of the record.
And then “Tonight, Tonight,” was a song that we messed around with for about four months. And one night it just came to me in a flash, like what the song needed to sound like, and I went upstairs to this room that I had in my house and I just remember playing it like I could hear the whole orchestra in my head and I thought, OK, that’s what I need to do.
Something I see on this new reissue is that there’s going to be a lot of recordings from that live 1996 tour right after the release of the album. What was it like relistening to these performances, especially as it was the last tour with the band’s full original lineup?
We had crested a particular wave at the time. We had a No. 1 album. We were playing, I think, a 90-date arena tour, which, now there’s a ton of artists playing stadiums, but back then an arena show was essentially the top of the mountain. So then we had success, we had fame, we had money that we’d never had.
With that, we had all the trappings. And I think in the recordings that are on this record that’s coming out, it’s like a light burning bright before it burns out. If you’ve ever had that experience, you’re in a room and all of a sudden the lightbulb gets really intense and then it burns out. So, you hear us basically burning out.
And there’s a sort of incandescent poetic beauty to all that, and there’s just the sorrow to it because you also realize it’s the last of that moment. In many ways, it was truly the end of that band. I mean, yes, the band has continued, and James [Iha] and Jimmy [Chamberlin] and I have been playing back together again for seven years, and released more records and had a tremendous amount of success of late.
But you can never recapture the innocence of youth or the innocence of the time. When you combine those types of experiences with loss and sorrow and the knowledge of what didn’t happen or what could have happened, then it makes revisiting this time bittersweet.
What do you think “Mellon Collie” means today and how has it been for you to see younger generations continue to be inspired by it?
I view that album in particular very much within the realm of a child who grows up in a latchkey situation. It’s very much a Gen X term. Latchkey kids were those whose parents were working a lot or not home, so they grew up by and large unsupervised. So what does a kid who grows up unsupervised do? They watched a lot of television, and then we consumed a lot of sugar and got up to a lot of delinquent-type things.
So I think the album is very representative of that experience and I think why it continues to resonate for subsequent generations is, it’s very dissociative. Back in the ’90s, the mainstream culture, including the L.A. Times and the New York Times, they really struggled with, “Where’s this all coming from?” Now you are living in a world that is constantly dissociative thanks to social media.
The thing that’s surprising, I’m basing it on personal conversations I’ve had with tons of musicians through the years, is that our album gave some musicians the permission to pursue a wider artistic vision. Because “Mellon Collie” is so wide. It has so much breadth. So what I’ve heard from other artists is, “Wow, when I heard that album, I thought, I can do this too, but in my own way.” And that to me is like, that’s a penultimate compliment from another musician. It’s really humbling.
The greatest thrill now is seeing that young people really do connect with the record. And they connect with songs that are different from the previous generations, which is even cooler. They seem to like the weirder stuff on it rather than the ... let’s call it, the classic rock alternative stuff.
That’s a cool way of looking at it. Like the previous generation probably was really obsessed with “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and maybe newer listeners aren’t as focused on that song specifically. In that song, it’s interesting that you say, “Can you fake it for just one more show?” Or this feeling of putting on a performance and feeling that you have to fake it as an artist. Is that something that still resonates with you?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because you work so hard to be on that stage and then, as Roger Waters so aptly describes in “The Wall,” you find yourself having a surrealist experience on that same stage. You put yourself through hell to get there and then one day you’re standing there and you’re like, what am I doing here?
I’ve had similar moments where I’m standing on stage and you feel like you’re tripping on drugs, but you’re totally sober. Because the thing that you love inverts on you. When I was a kid, I thought being on TV was a peak thing. But then I was there, about to perform on TV, and there were all these things going on, like you’re tired, or you’re being sued or your bandmate doesn’t like the deli tray. And I just thought, what am I doing here? I felt like I was living in “Spinal Tap.” This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be glamorous. This is supposed to be a thousand other things that you put on the rock-star checklist and you find yourself saying, I don’t want to be here.
If you turn to your friends or your family and say, “I’m really struggling with how I’m supposed to process the information that I’m receiving up here,” you’re told you’re ungrateful or you’re out of your mind or you really need to check your ego. I reached a point where it was like, no, I don’t have the skill set to survive punishing my mind, body, spirit five to six nights a week in front of strangers singing songs that are very personal to me and I hear the cheering and I see the flash bulbs popping, but I’m so numb that I can’t feel what’s happening. So in a lot of ways, that song and the themes from the album are still real.
You’ve said in the “Mellon Collie” sessions, you guys were working on 50 songs at once, that you’re working for six hours a day, just really intense in the studio. What are your thoughts as you think back to that? Were there any memories that really arise for you?
Despite our public persona of being dysfunctional and brawling, we were quite quiet in the rehearsal space. We almost never had guests and 97% of the time, it was just the four of us in a room working.
So, the real memory for me is just day after day after day of trying tons and tons of different ideas, and it started to wind itself into a story through those 60-plus songs, many of which came out in those few years. It was our best period of musical alignment and I think you can hear that. We worked very hard and very peacefully together for eight months to put all that together.
We had just come off a tour, “Siamese Dream,” which was a 14-month tour, and we went in the studio for eight months, made the “Mellon Collie” record, and we immediately went back on tour. And that tour was 22 months long. So when you ask my memory from that time, it’s like, can you describe the blur? It was a really beautiful blur, you know?
You said something really interesting earlier about “Tonight, Tonight” coming to you with the sound of an orchestra. Talk about what it was like to see that song and this album come to life as an opera with Chicago Lyric.
The idea that I would even not only write something on the piano, and now, a full orchestra is playing that song here in Chicago with the lyrics I wrote ... is totally mind-blowing. The first time I heard it with an orchestra, I started to cry, because I thought, this is so crazy. This song that I used to teach myself how to play the piano was now being played by some of the greatest musicians in the world in this beautiful opera hall. I can’t explain to you the strangeness of that journey.
I was made fun of [for using classical instruments in ’90s rock music]. It was seen as too precocious or too artsy or too, I don’t know, overly grand. And now, if you look at alternative music, I mean, there’s been an absolute explosion of people using unconventional instrumentation within the breath of alternative music, as it should be. So it makes me laugh now that there was a time where somehow that was pseudo-controversial.
Coming to my last question for you, how did this album impact your life 30 years later and impact your artistry?
After putting out something like this, artistically it was a triumph. But then publicly it became surreal. We hit a level where people were following you through malls and we were on MTV. It’s not like we had not tasted success, but this was this other stratospheric aspect of success. And something about that album just kind of blew everything wide open.
Family relationships, personal relationships, business relationships, everything just kind of went sideways. I remember thinking nothing was quite the same after that album. Which is true, but it’s not true the way you think it is.
The album has never left my life and is never far away from the conversation. It was never like I put it down and left it behind. Other people won’t let me forget and that’s a good thing because the value holds, and I’ll never forget about it.
ON THE RISE
Gang of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe has spoken to NME about the band’s first new single in four years ‘Things Take Time’ and the “philosophical freedom” that has come with writing new material for the band’s long-awaited fourth studio album.
The single marks the band’s first new original material since their acclaimed 2022 album ‘Angel In Realtime.’, and marks a significant change of pace. Rather than returning to the maximalist, big-swinging indie-rock that has shaped their previous albums, ‘Things Take Time’ opts for a refined and jazzy groove that swings atop sparse piano chords and stabs of horns.
As far as comeback singles go, it’s about as subtle and discreet as possible – as if it’s entering through a side door rather than kicking the front gate open. As Le’aupepe revealed, this has very much been done by design.
‘Angel In Realtime.’ was given four stars by NME upon its 2022 release, and described as “a triumphant exploration of love and life”. It led to the biggest shows of the band’s career, including their first-ever headlining arena shows in their native Australia and selling out Brixton Academy in the UK. After a final show in support of the record at British Summer Time with Lana Del Rey, however, Gang of Youths effectively went dark – save for the late 2023 release of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ for the festive season.
“We all live quiet lives,” Le’aupepe told NME. “We don’t have our own social media, or anything like that. We’re not interested in the public stuff, and I tend to require a lot of respite from the world. Having said that, we’re all kind of ready for it again now. It’s weirdly exciting.”
Check out the full interview with Le’aupepe below, where he discussed the differences between observational and emotive songwriting, the ongoing struggle with perfectionism and why Gang of Youths continually has to die in order to be reborn again.
NME: Hello Dave. Of all the new material the band has been working on, why was ‘Things Take Time’ chosen as the first single?
David Le’aupepe: “Well, the powers that be chose it – probably because it’s the shortest one! It’s a three-minute song, which is miraculous for a band like ours. It’s also a pop song, which is a form I’ve not really dabbled in much. It was a really liberating song to write – I’ve used that word so many times in interviews in the past, but in this instance it really set me free in a sense. I’m actually singing for once, too. I’ve done a lot of talking that happens to be in tune, or these grandiose fucking yells, but I haven’t really allowed my voice to be free like this before.
“One of the things I really like about the song is that, when it was finished and we listened back to it, it felt like a proper break with the past – and we were OK with that. We’ve achieved great things in the past, and we’re proud of it, but this is the thread we’re following now musically. I was delighted by that.”
What place did the song come from in a lyrical sense?
“It’s about nothing… Well, not nothing. It’s about growing plants. My wife ordered too many tomato seeds, so she went to work growing all of these tomatoes in our house. I go over to record with Tom [Hobden, Gang of Youths’ multi-instrumentalist] at his home studio, and that overlooks his back garden. His wife Emma grows all these beautiful plants in the yard. It got me fascinated with the cycle of growth and death, and being baffled that people can grow things without killing them.
“It’s funny… I feel like death and rebirth are a constant part of our subject matter. We’re always dealing with them in one way or another, so it’s kind of weird that we almost accidentally continued it – even though the song is so different for us.”
How naturally did the musical change of pace come to you? There’s fittingly a bit of a parallel with a song like ‘Tend the Garden’, but even that feels a lot bigger and more layered in comparison to ‘Things Take Time’…
“I came in with the idea one night after dinner, and played the little riff. Recorded it, played a drum part, recorded that, got Donnie [Borzestowski, Gang of Youths’ drummer] to redo it, and voilà. You hear all of us at work on this song. When Tom heard my little ‘doo doo doo’ in the verse, it was his idea to chuck in a horn arrangement to replicate them. Donnie is a world-class drummer, and doing something a bit jazzier was right in his repertoire.
“As for Jung [Kim, Gang of Youths’ guitarist/keyboardist], he always has such a deft hand. He’s always so careful, and so organised with his thoughts. I think that’s why it was funny when I finally sent in my vocal take – after doing like 400 takes, he was just like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t really need to worry about it’. Nothing came easily, but everything just made sense.”
Everything went into radio silence after ‘Angel in Realtime.’ Was there ever a period between that cycle ending and the new one beginning where you genuinely thought Gang of Youths was over?
“Of course. That happens after every album we’ve made. I sit there at the end saying ‘I’m done’, and then enough time passes and I’m up like Leo [DiCaprio] in The Wolf of Wall Street: ‘I’m not fucking leaving!’ Out of all of the cycles, ‘Angel’ was definitely the hardest. I love that album, I really do; I think it’s my best songwriting, but it was this whole family odyssey. The arena thing was so weird, too. We’re an indie rock band – we never set out to play in stadiums, especially when you look at how scrappy we were when the band started. It was just the nature of things.
“If we came back trying to be an arena-rock band? Snoozy as fuck. We’re not in that place anymore. Those songs from ‘Angel’ are everyone else’s now. They don’t really play a role in my day-to-day life, or my inner world. What ‘Things Take Time’ represents is a philosophical freedom from having to write about personal shit. I had to break this cycle of feeling like I have to make opuses that dig into the underbelly of my life every single time. I could just write songs with their own meaning, that are curious and spiritual without having to directly cost me something.”
Was it a process of realising a song could still be reflective of you without having to be very hyper-literally about you, the way a song like ‘Brothers’ was?
“The writing now is less and less about trying to find things within myself to deal with, and more and more about things that I notice and that I contemplate. The new songs are, more often than not, about something I’ve observed rather than something I’ve felt. They’re about the external. There’s another new song we played, ‘YeYu’, and that’s probably the only really personal song out of all of them. That’s a real point of difference for a songwriter like me.”
As you just mentioned, you played your first show in three years earlier this month at a small theatre 90 minutes south of Sydney, with three new songs on the setlist – including ‘Things Take Time’. What did performing on stage again mean to you?
“Loads. It renewed something in me. There was a real warmth and affection there – you always get that with regional audiences in beautiful theatres. I knew some people who were in the front row, and who said hi afterwards. People have gotten married since they last saw us, or had kids since they last saw us. It was nice to see a lot of those familiar faces, and to see how they’re existing and how life is for them now. Hell, it was just nice to see people again. Sometimes, the boredom and the monotony of playing live and touring can wear down on even the most dedicated road dog. We all felt that at the end of the last tour, so there were some nerves in coming back to it. As soon as we stepped out on stage, though, it was like, ‘this is what it’s all about. This is the point of it all’.”
That show felt like a lot of the older material was being reinvented through the lens of the new stuff. You played ‘Magnolia’ solo on electric guitar, and ‘Let Me Down Easy’ was pared back in a really subtle way. Can we expect Gang of Youths’ shows to play out a little differently now that it’s no longer a confetti-cannon arena rock show?
“We haven’t even figured that out yet. This was our first foray into really doing it again, you know? The album that we’re working on has more of a sense of just plugging in and playing – a lot of bare elements of piano, bass, drums, vocals. We want these songs to stand out by themselves, as opposed to needing loads of backing tracks running in order for them to work. That factored into the live show – could we reinvent these songs in a way that makes sense to us? It was about striking a middle ground between giving people familiarity and us not dying of boredom.”
Is the new album done?
“Nah.”
How will you know when it’s done?
“When someone tells me it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever made! With [debut album, 2015’s] ‘The Positions’, I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew we had a deadline to turn everything in. With [second album, 2017’s] ‘Go Farther in Lightness’, I was totally sure about every aspect of that album before we turned it in. All I really know about this one, so far, is that when I got back the masters for ‘Things Take Time’, it felt like I was closer to the end of the album than I was to the beginning. I’ve always cooked the goose too long, I think, and now it’s a process of learning not to.”
‘Things Take Time’ is out now. Gang of Youths will perform at All Points East in London’s Hyde Park with Twenty One Pilots on August 30 before a run of UK and European shows in November and December. Visit here for tickets and more information.
