The Smashing Pumpkins song Billy Corgan just “threw together”
Most fans of The Smashing Pumpkins will tell you that their 1993 second album, Siamese Dream, is practically a greatest-hits record. Given the increasingly divisive arc the band embarked on after it and the widespread influence of its tracks, this was undoubtedly the pinnacle of their career when the stars aligned, and they caught themselves in a moment of utter creative flow.
While the record is mainly known for its thunderous alternative rock staples such as the singles ‘Cherub Rock’ and ‘Today’, which soldered metal grit with the spacey substance of shoegaze and psychedelia, one area that Billy Corgan and the rest of the band really excelled at on it are the tender moments.
The finest example of this is ‘Mayonaise’. While featuring crunching chords and Corgan’s angsty, nasally delivery, it’s an absolute masterclass in his expressive sliding chords, penetrating bends, and expanding the parameters of a ballad by instilling it with these notably heavy aspects.
Arguably, the highlight of the song is Corgan’s masterful, effects-coated solo. However, the whistling feedback, chorus melody, exquisite picking pattern, and impassioned climax where the frontman screams, “Try to understand”, all contribute to a song that is one of the Chicago band’s finest and a representation of the jaded spirit of Generation X.
Surprisingly, despite capturing the imagination with lines such as “Fool enough to almost be it / Cool enough to not quite see it” and the apparently autobiographical “Mother, weep the years I’m missing / All our time can’t be given / Back”, Corgan has maintained that the lyrics of one of his most resonant songs aren’t as deep as they seem.
Corgan has never been the most trusted source. This position was earned due to contradictory statements in the media and the fact that he once explained he would end up calling a song ‘Cow’, after writing about a chandelier that emits red light, and that’s the colour you’re not supposed to wear near a bull. Yet, as the misspelt ‘Mayonaise’ was one of the only collaborations between him and guitarist James Iha on the record, which the latter claims came together naturally, maybe his point does have credence.
The Smashing Pumpkins leader once claimed that when he wrote the affecting lyrics to the profoundly minor-key track, he just “threw together a bunch of weird one liners”. He noted that the song doesn’t have any sense of continuity; and when examining the words, you notice this is true, jumping from the line about his mother to, “Shut my mouth and strike the demons / That cursed you and your reasons”.
Over time, though, Corgan has said that the song has gradually started to make sense to him, with it symbolising his complicated personal situation at the time, which not only saw him try and keep together a band fraying at the seams but battle internally with suicidal depression, weight gain and writer’s block.
Corgan would also reveal on the Reinvented podcast in 2022 the reasons behind the song’s seemingly random title. He maintained that previous explanations for the title, such as looking in his refrigerator at its contents and that ‘Mayonaise’ stands for the phonetics of ‘My Own Eyes’, were in-jokes of the band. The true inspiration was that when they played Japan in 1992 to tour their debut Gish, the label had mistranslated a lyric from the album in a fan booklet as “mayonnaise seas”. They thought it was hilarious and used it as a temporary title for the new song when recording Siamese Dream, and it stuck.
