I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream is my favorite 90s album. It’s also one of my all-time favorite albums of any era. And it’s a seasonal album for me. I have a tradition of taking it out and spending time with at the same time every year: late August into early September. Because when it was released in the summer of 1993, it became my personal soundtrack for those summer-into-fall months.
Last week, I looked at the calendar and saw it was time to break it out once again. I also remembered that I’d not resequenced an album for the month of August yet. You no doubt see where this is going.
Yes, I resequenced Siamese Dream. And yes, it was an unmitigated disaster. The album is near-perfect in its original sequencing (Billy Corgan is, after all, an unflinching perfectionist). Also, messing with the DNA of an album an that has worn grooves into my psyche over the last quarter-century took the usual levels of nostalgia I feel when listening and warped them in an almost Lynchian way. Melancholy became terror. It wasn’t just a sub-par resequencing, it was a monster. And I was Dr. Frankenstein.
So I won’t revive the monster here. Instead, I’ll encourage you to experience it in its proper order.
