Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness - Music

Music

The songs of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness are intended to hang together conceptually, with the two halves of the album representing day and night. Despite this, Corgan has rejected the term concept album to describe it, and it was at the time described as more "loose" and "vague" than the band's previous records. However, Billy Corgan has also said that the album is based on "the human condition of mortal sorrow". Corgan aimed the album's message at people aged 14 to 24 years, hoping "to sum up all the things I felt as a youth but was never able to voice articulately." He summed up by stating, "I'm waving goodbye to me in the rear view mirror, tying a knot around my youth and putting it under the bed."

The sprawling nature of the album means that it utilizes several different diverse styles amongst the songs, contrasting what some critics felt was the "one dimensional flavor" of the previous two albums. A much wider variety of instrumentation is used, such as piano ("Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness"), synthesizers and drum loops ("1979"), a live orchestra ("Tonight, Tonight"), and even salt shakers and scissors ("Cupid de Locke").

All guitars on the album were tuned down a half-step in order to "make the music a little lower", according to Corgan. On some songs, like "Jellybelly", the first string was tuned down an additional whole step to C# (referred to by Corgan as "the 'grunge tuning'"). There was a greater variety to the number of guitar overdubs utilized than on previous albums. Iha said, "n the past, everything had to be overdubbed and layered—guitar overkill. That wasn't really the train of thought this time, although we did that too." "To Forgive" consists of only one live guitar take, while "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" contains approximately 70 guitar tracks. The various sections of "Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” were recorded at various times, with different instruments and recording setups, and were digitally composited in Pro Tools. Corgan and Iha shared soloing duties; Iha estimated that the guitar solo duties were divided "half and half" on the record.

All but two songs on the album were written by Corgan. The closing track from the first disc, "Take Me Down", was written and sung by Iha, while the album's final track, "Farewell and Goodnight", features lead vocals by all four band members and, according to the BMI database, was written solely by Iha, despite being credited on the album liner notes as being written by both Iha and Corgan. Iha wrote additional songs during the making of the album, but they did not make the final cut. Corgan said in a 1995 Rolling Stone interview, "here are some B sides that James did that are really good. They just don't fit in the context of the album. And part of me feels bad. But over the seven years we've been together, the least uptight part of the band has been the music."