Siamese Dream

Billy Corgan was suicidal during parts of the making of this album. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin had a severe heroin addiction. Guitarist James Iha and bassist D'arcy Wretzky had recently ended their relationship and could barely be in the same room. The band had relocated to a studio in Marietta, Georgia specifically to cut Chamberlin off from his drug connections and to avoid the distractions of their Chicago scene. What Corgan later remembered of this period was one of the darkest of his life, though the album he made from it is widely considered one of the most exhilarating rock records of the nineties.

Butch Vig, who had just produced Nevermind, came back to produce. He and Corgan worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week by the end, entirely on analog tape. Corgan played most of the guitar and bass himself, layering tracks in patterns so complex that Vig had to draw elaborate maps of each song's architecture to track where every instrument lived. For the centerpiece track "Soma," the guitar map required continuing onto the back of the track sheet. The mixing engineer Alan Moulder, who had worked on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, was brought in for the mix. He estimated two weeks. It took thirty-six days. The album finished four months behind schedule and $250,000 over budget.

"Today," which sounds like the most jubilant song on the record, was written on a day Corgan was having suicidal thoughts. That inversion of surface and interior runs all the way through Siamese Dream, which is how an album this heavy became this impossible to stop listening to.