Simon Stalenhag And Smashing Pumpkins In The Electric State reup

1979 Album: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995)
Tonight Tonight Album: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995)
Ava Adore Album: Adore (1998)
Bullet with Butterfly Wings Album: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995)
by The Smashing Pumpkins

In 1997, a runaway teenager and her yellow toy robot travel west through a strange USA. The ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, heaped together with the discarded trash of a high tech consumerist society in decline. As their car approaches the edge of the continent, the world outside the window seems to be unraveling ever faster—as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.

The Smashing Pumpkins 1979, Tonight Tonight, Ava Adore, Bullet with Butterfly Wings

1979 contains the same numbers as 1997 where the electric state takes place.

Lead singer Billy Corgan wrote "1979" about making the transition out of youth and into adulthood. He remembered being in high school and having adult responsibilities like a car and job, but still being very much a youth and dependent on his parents.

Corgan chose 1979 for the title because it rhymed with many of the words he wanted to use in the lyrics.

Corgan (from VH1 Storytellers): "Sometimes, when I write a song, I see a picture in my head. For some reason, it's of the obscure memory I have." The memory that goes with 1979 is from when he was around 18 years old. He was driving down a road near his home on a rainy night, and was waiting at a traffic light. He says that the picture "emotionally connotes a feeling of waiting for something to happen, and not being quite there yet, but it's just around the corner."

1979 was the last song written for Mellon Collie. Corgan told the producer that he thought it had a lot of potential, so the producer gave Corgan 24 hours to make it work, or else it wouldn't be on the album. He went home that night and came up with the lyrics, and they recorded it the next day.

Corgan had a version of 1979 written long before it was released, but he didn't think it fit the mood of any of their previous albums.

The video for 1979 took three days to shoot and included a scene where a bunch of kids are at a party, and Smashing Pumpkins are the house band. The original tape of this scene was lost after a crew member forgot that had placed it on top of his car and drove away. A new video was cobbled together with unused footage, plus new footage shot by the group. The production assistant who drove off without the tapes was sentenced to stand in the city center with a sandwich board that said: "Lost Tapes, reward for return" on it.

1979 was nominated for two Grammys - Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance.

Billy Corgan once joked, "We wrote this song (1979) for Michael Jackson, but found he couldn't do the Moonwalk to it."

The husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris directed the video. The supermarket mayhem in the clip is reminiscent of a video they did five years earlier: "Been Caught Stealing" by Jane's Addiction.

Billy Corgan began writing for the follow-up to Siamese Dream after the tour in support of that album; however, the recording of "Tonight, Tonight" first began while the Pumpkins were still on the Siamese Dream tour when Corgan booked the band into a local Chicago studio to record all of their song ideas on tape.

On The Howard Stern Show, Corgan has said that the song pays homage to Cheap Trick, with its black humoresque lyrics and theme, and that the song is addressed to himself, who escaped from an abusive childhood against all odds, so as to keep him believing in himself.

One of the most enduring Smashing Pumpkins songs, "Tonight, Tonight" is also one of their most mysterious. Written by lead singer Billy Corgan, the song alludes to change and uncertainty, ending on a very hopeful note that sounds like a mantra from a self-help book: "The impossible is possible tonight."

Corgan often throws us off the scent when it comes to explaining his songs (at a 1998 show in London, he dedicated Tonight Tonight to "our friends in Northern Ireland," but he seemed sincere when he talked about it on The Howard Stern Show in 2012. He explained that the song is about himself, and how he was able to get out of his hometown of Chicago to pursue his dreams.

The highly acclaimed video for Tonight Tonight was directed by the married couple Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who went on to direct the movies Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Battle Of The Sexes (2017). The "Tonight, Tonight" video shows the band floating on clouds in the night sky; it's based on the groundbreaking 1902 film Trip to the Moon by the French director Georges Melies. His name is the name of the ship at the end of the music video: the S.S. Meiles.

Tonight Tonight won six MTV Video Music Awards: Video of the Year, Breakthrough Video, Best Direction Best Special Effects, Best Art Direction, and Best Cinematography. It was also nominated for Viewer's Choice Award and Best Editing.

The band recorded Tonight Tonight with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, using a 30-piece string-section.

Tonight Tonight was written in the key of C instead of G, but Corgan couldn't sing it in C.

The line, "And the embers never fade in your city by the lake, The place where you were born" in a reference to Corgan's home city of Chicago. Tonight Tonight has an acoustic reprise on the single where Billy sings the line.

Pumpkins bass player D'arcy Wretzky liked the sets from the video for Tonight Tonight so much, she put them in a barn on her farm.

"Ava Adore" was the first single from their fourth album, Adore, and exhibited a new sound from the band which integrated traditional instruments with loops and electronic music. "Ava Adore" and the B-sides were written by Billy Corgan.

When released as a single in May 1998, "Ava Adore" reached number one in Iceland, number two in Greece, number five in New Zealand, and the top 20 in Australia, Canada, Hungary, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, it reached number 42 on the Billboard Hot 100, number three on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and number eight on the Mainstream Rock chart.

The single Ava Adore marked a change in musical direction for the band, as frontman Billy Corgan had consciously decided to incorporate more loops, electronic sounds, and non-traditional instruments into the band's music.

Ava Adore was featured on the MuchMusic compilation album Big Shiny Tunes 3. Other bands on the disc included Foo Fighters, Matthew Good Band, and Semisonic.

The video for Ava Adore was directed by Dom and Nic, who have also worked with Trent Reznor, David Bowie, and The Chemical Brothers.

The video for Ava Adore won an award for Most Stylish Video at the 1998 VH1 Fashion Awards.

Lead singer Billy Corgan wrote this about pain that comes from being a rock star. The lyrics to Bullet with Butterfly Wings are exceptionally dramatic, and Corgan has said they are a bit of a joke.

Bullet with Butterfly Wings was the first single off Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and Smashing Pumpkins' second biggest US hit - "1979" hit #12.

This won a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. The next year, they won the same award for "The End Is The Beginning Is The End."

In the video for Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Corgan still has hair. However, when it was released, he had cut all of his hair off. Ever since, Billy has been bald.

Possibly shedding some light on what to read into the lyrics of Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Corgan once said: "If people were interested in my own personal story and they knew every thing that had happened too me in my childhood, I think they would look at me differently because I was raised in a family that set me up to fail."

"The weird nihilism that permeates Mellon Collie is extremely relevant to what's going on right now. So many kids are intelligent and articulate, but they don't know what to do with themselves," Corgan said of the album. He's saying that the anger and feeling of having no one to trust is a reflection of youth in particular and society in general. He also once said this song was a strong personal representation of how he felt at the time, particularly with his growing fame - "the world is a vampire" basically means he feels like everyone wants to latch on and take something from him.

The video for Bullet with Butterfly Wings shows a large group of dirty diamond miners working as the band plays. They gradually descend to the pit where Smashing Pumpkins are playing, forming a mosh pit of sorts.

Billy Corgan worked on the video with Samuel Bayer, whose striking imagery is on display in the videos for The Cranberries' "Zombie" and Blind Melon's "No Rain." Bayer came up with the concept, which is based on photos Sebastiao Salgado took of Brazilian laborers.

Karen O covered this for the Amazon series Hanna in 2019; Smashing Pumpkins called it a "beautiful cover" in a tweet. She also contributed an original song, "Anti-Lullaby," to the soundtrack.

Billy Corgan wrote the song's chorus the same day that the band recorded their cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" at the BBC. He recalled to Kerrang:

"I was sitting there bored out of my mind (the producers) were dicking around with some microphone, and I had this line in my head, 'Despite all my rage. I'm still just a rat in a cage.' I was just sitting there, bored, and I picked up the guitar and I started singing. But what if the guy had been like, 'Ooh we're ready!'? People don't appreciate that there's a thing that needs to happen. The stars need to align."

The song had its origins during the recording of 1993's Siamese Dream. According to frontman Billy Corgan, "I have a tape of us from 1993 endlessly playing the 'world is a vampire' part over and over". It was not until 1995 that Corgan finished the song with the noted chorus "rat in a cage"