This week (thirty years ago) one of the all time great albums hit #1 on the charts in its first week of sales. It would go on to sell over 10 million copies, making it one of the best selling albums of all time. And deservedly so. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins is one of my favorite albums. According to last.fm, I have played a song off the album over 600 times.

I remember when the lead single off the album, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, hit the radio. Of course it's a banger, but what I remember thirty years later is mishearing the line "despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage." I could make out the "despite all my rage" part, but I couldn't quite figure out the second half. I think I had some nonsense words there, but it's been so long since I learned the correct words that I've forgotten what I thought the words were!

Another single off the album, 1979, was cool because that's the year I was born. The song is about entering adolescence, and in 1995 I was in the throes of adolescence myself. A great coincidence!

All of the big singles off this album still get plenty of radio plays, but the whole album deserves to be listened to in its entirety. I did not find listening to this album another time for this project a chore or unpleasant. Indeed, it was a pleasure, and I look forward to listening to the album again and again for years to come. You should listen to the album today, and again and again.

I've listened to a fair amount of Smashing Pumpkins over the last 18 years, but before now I had never listened to this album. This album is actually a compilation which might be why I never checked it out until now. Perhaps another reason is that this album is not one of their most popular. This week it hit #4 but in the coming weeks it plunges down the order pretty quickly.

The only song off the album that was released as a single was a cover of Landslide originally by Fleetwood Mac. That cover did quite well and I remember hearing it on the radio 30 years ago, and I'm pretty sure I've heard it on the radio since then fairly consistently.

According to Wikipedia, this is one of the better reviewed Smashing Pumpkins albums. I think that the songs in isolation are all pretty good, but being a compilation the cohesion between songs isn't the best. I don't think I'll listen to this album all that much going forward mostly because other Pumpkins albums are better.