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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSv3l6lSr8s
The story
Siamese Dream is always on my shortlist whenever the topic of lifechanging or coming-of-age albums comes up. It was one of the first albums i ever bought, and one of the few which has held up over the years - i can listen to it today and enjoy all of the songs on their own merits (in addition to the warm fuzzy feelings of nostalgia they can sometimes evoke).
As is often the case, the album's impact had a lot to do with timing. 1993/1994 brought a number of beginnings for me. I was just starting to develop a true love for music. I was starting to get into rock and metal in earnest. And i was starting to come into my own, going through the development/discovery of identity (and related emotional processing) that many teenagers go through.
The Smashing Pumpkins were one of many bands who gel'd with this emergence, part of the alternative movement which coincided with this pivotal time for me. I know that "real" "grunge" was over by that point (emphasis on the quotation marks), but alternative rock as a whole was still in full swing, and the eventual post-grunge saturation and backlash hadn't (in my opinion) gained critical mass yet.
I remember hearing Disarm, Today, and Cherub Rock on the radio, and enjoying the songs enough to want to buy the cd. (Buying a cd was a big deal back then, mainly due to the limited budget of a broke high school kid (this was before i discovered cheap discs via BMG's mail order service).) Siamese Dream was a welcome addition to my tiny collection, and kept good company with the likes of In Utero, Core, Get A Grip, Bat out of Hell II, and the black album.
Naturally, when you only own 10 cds, you listen to the same albums over and over again, and eventually some of them get played out. Siamese Dream, however, was one of the albums i never got tired of, even after weeks and months (and eventually, years) of constant play.
Through that constant play, I found myself slowly gravitating to track #9, often repeating the song multiple times, or skipping straight to that one and letting the rest of the album cycle around it. Some nights i'd just put that one song on repeat for hours, letting the waves of distortion and emotion carry me away. I didn't really listen to lyrics back then, so i didn't notice what he was singing about; it was just the *feel* of the song that was so compelling; heavy thrum offset by sweet melodies, gloomy and sad, but somehow peaceful and soothing.
Mayonaise is one of those songs i keep coming back to. Even now, 20 years later, there are times when there's nothing else i feel like hearing.
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