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Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the third studio album and first double album by the American alternative rock band the Smashing Pumpkins, released on October 23, 1995, in the United Kingdom and on October 24 in the United States by Virgin Records. It was produced by vocalist and guitarist Billy Corgan, alongside producers Flood and Alan Moulder. The lengthy 28-track album was released as a two-disc CD and a triple LP. The album features a wide array of musical styles, including art rock, grunge, alternative pop, and heavy metal. Propelled by its lead single "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", the album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 246,500 units. It remains the band's only album to top the Billboard 200. It spawned five more singles—"1979", "Zero", "Tonight, Tonight", the promotional "Muzzle" and "Thirty-Three"—over the course of 1996, and was certified diamond by the RIAA, equivalent to more than 10 million units sold in the US. Recording sessions saw a wealth of productivity: dozens of fully completed songs were cut from the album and would surface on later releases. A box set released in November 1996 titled The Aeroplane Flies High compiled the promotional singles from the album and featured approximately 30 fully completed songs from the Mellon Collie sessions that had not made the final cut for the album (including one track, "Pastichio Medley", which contained more than 70 short snippets of songs in various states of completion). Both Mellon Collie and The Aeroplane Flies High later saw reissues that included even more tracks from the sessions. Lauded by critics for its ambition and scope, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness earned the band seven Grammy Award nominations in 1997, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year ("1979"), as well as nine MTV Music Video Awards nominations, eight of which were for "Tonight, Tonight", including Video of the Year. The singles became hits on mainstream rock and modern rock stations, and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", "1979", "Tonight, Tonight" and "Thirty-Three" became the band's first Top 40 hits, crossing over to pop radio stations. It has since been regarded as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s and of all time. Recording and production After the 13-month tour in support of the Smashing Pumpkins' second album Siamese Dream (1993), Billy Corgan immediately began writing songs for the band's next record. From the outset, the band intended the new record to be a double album, partly inspired by the Beatles' self-titled album. Corgan said, "We almost had enough material to make Siamese Dream a double album. With this new album, I really liked the notion that we would create a wider scope in which to put other kinds of material we were writing." Corgan felt that the band's musical approach was running its course, and wanted the band to approach the album as if it were its last. Corgan described the album at the time to the music press as "The Wall for Generation X", a comparison with Pink Floyd's 1979 album, one of the highest-selling and best-known concept albums of all time. The band decided against working with Butch Vig, who had produced the group's previous albums, and selected Flood and Alan Moulder as coproducers. Corgan explained, "To be completely honest, I think it was a situation where we'd become so close to Butch that it started to work to our disadvantage... I just felt we had to force the situation, sonically, and take ourselves out of normal Pumpkin recording mode. I didn't want to repeat past Pumpkin work." Flood immediately pushed the band to change its recording practices. Corgan later said, "Flood felt like the band he would see live wasn't really captured on record". In April 1995, the band began recording in a rehearsal space instead of entering the studio straight away. At these sessions, the band recorded rough rhythm tracks with Flood. Although originally designed to create a rough draft for the record, the rehearsal-space sessions yielded much of the new album's rhythm-section parts. Flood also insisted that the band set aside time each day devoted to jamming or songwriting, practices in which the band had never before engaged during recording sessions. Corgan said, "Working like that kept the whole process very interesting—kept it from becoming a grind." Corgan sought to eliminate the tension, long hours, and emotional strain that permeated the Siamese Dream recording sessions, about which he said, "[T]o me, the biggest offender was the insidious amounts of time that everyone spends waiting for guitar parts to be overdubbed. There were literally weeks where no one had anything to do but sit and wait." The band countered idleness by using two recording rooms at the same time. This tactic allowed Corgan to develop vocals and song arrangements in one room while recording occurred in the other. During these sessions, Flood and Corgan would work in one room as Moulder, guitarist James Iha and bassist D'arcy Wretzky worked in a second. Iha and Wretzky had much greater roles in the recording sessions of Mellon Collie compared to previous albums. This was, in large part, to counter rumours from the Siamese Dream sessions that Corgan was recording all of the bass and guitar parts by himself. Iha commented about how the recording sessions for Mellon Collie improved from that of Siamese Dream, noting: The big change is that Billy is not being the big 'I do this—I do that'. It's much better. The band arranged a lot of songs for this record, and the song writing process was organic. The circumstances of the last record and the way that we worked was really bad. Following the rehearsal-space sessions, the band recorded overdubs at the Chicago Recording Company. Pro Tools was used for recording guitar overdubs as well as for post-production electronic looping and sampling. Wretzky also recorded numerous backup vocal parts, but all were cut except that which was recorded for "Beautiful". When the recording sessions concluded, the band had 57 potential songs for inclusion on Mellon Collie. The album was originally planned to have 31 songs, but the count was reduced to 28. Music The songs on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness are intended to work together conceptually, with the two halves of the album representing day and night. Despite this, Corgan has rejected the term concept album to describe it, and it was at the time described as more "loose" and "vague" than were the band's previous records. He also said it is based on "the human condition of mortal sorrow". Corgan aimed the album's message at people between 14 and 24 years of age, hoping "to sum up all the things I felt as a youth but was never able to voice articulately. ... I'm waving goodbye to me in the rear view mirror, tying a knot around my youth and putting it under the bed." Musically, the album has been described as featuring alternative rock, grunge, alternative metal, ar.... Discover the Smashing Magazine Various Authors popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Smashing Magazine Various Authors books.