Hannah

While ‘Mellon Collie’ guided my entry into Vietnam, er, I mean high school, by the time I discovered ‘Siamese Dream’ I was already deep in the trenches. Home had gotten even worse and school was, well, ya know, HORRIBLE.

Prompted by my love for ‘Mellon Collie,’ I decided to make my way through their earlier material. Having read a ton of articles about the band, I knew ‘Siamese Dream’ would be the next. I’ve never regretted it.

This is where I figured out that the ‘Bullet’ video wasn’t a fluke, Billy did, in fact, used to have hair! Trivial now, but that was huge when I was a teenager. I also purchased Vieuphoria around the same time and fell madly in love. The electric version of ‘Disarm’ still makes me all breathless.

Because much of what I posted in the ‘Mellon Collie’ entry applies to every single album in the catalog, I’m just going  to jump right into the rundown.

‘Cherub Rock’: Because I lacked a lot of knowledge about the early ’90s rock scene, this song didn’t make a lot of sense to me at first. As far as I was concerned, hipsters were a type of pants. After doing some background research, I realized what the song was about and my respect for Billy went through the roof.  I always like it when people call other people on their bull shit.

‘Quiet’: This epitomized my utter disgust with my classmates. I thought they were boorish and loud and obnoxious, and they constantly fucked up my ordered little universe. This was my way of yelling ‘SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP!’

‘Today’: This is almost like ‘Tonight, Tonight’ for me. Whenever I would get completely freaked out and think ‘I’m never going to get out of here!’ I would listen to this and say to myself, ‘Yeah, but today wasn’t so bad.’ The line ‘I’ve tried so hard to cleanse these regrets, my angel wings are bruised and restrained’ always hit me hard because I know what it’s like to feel like you’ll never be clean and you’ll always be stuck. And yes, when I shuffle free of my mortal coil, I want this played at my funeral. Oh and the line ‘I wanna turn you on’ really really did it for me.

‘Hummer’: So many lines from this helped through some crap times. ‘Happiness will make you wonder, will I feel OK?’ made me think about what I was going to if I ever did finally become happy, would I know how to accept it or would I throw it away? The line ‘I want something new, but what I am I supposed to do about you?’ brought to mind the fact that though we were as close as any two friends could be, my then best friend and I were drifting apart and as much as I wanted new and different things for my life, I was still terrified about leaving her behind.

‘Rocket’: ‘I torch my soul to show the world that I am pure deep inside my heart’ still describes me. ‘I want everything I’ll never be’ does too. ‘The moon is out, the stars invite, think I’ll leave tonight’ gave me the courage to be different and say ‘Don’t like it? Fuck you.’

‘Disarm’: Oh boy. I can’t count the number of times I have sat weeping to this song. This made me realize that what you hate is a reflection of you. So when kids tormented me for being different or being a freak, I realized it was because they felt different or like a freak for whatever reason and they were scared. I wasn’t afraid, which scared them even more. So the torment grew. ‘The bitterness of one who’s left alone’ struck a cord with me because I felt my parents never asked me about my life, my dreams, my fears. And anytime I did pipe up, I got picked on about it. ‘Send this smile over to you’ basically became my plan of attack and still is. If someone hurts me, all’s I can do is love them more.

‘Soma’: Though I had (have) no real romantic experience and this song is about a romance gone awry, it still connects with me. ‘I’m all by myself, as I’ve always felt’ was pretty much my mantra. ‘So let the sadness come again, on that you can depend on me, until the bitter bitter end of the world, God sleeps in bliss’ hit me like a ton of bricks the first time I heard it and never fails to do so more than 10 years later. And the live version of this leaves me utterly speechless and almost in tears.

‘Geek U.S.A.’: The only thing I can really say about this ‘I never liked me anyway.’ Being a teenager was GRREEEAAAT.

‘Mayonaise’: ‘When your life is so, so dreary, dream’ gave my depressed teenage self hope. ‘And I fail, but when I can, I will, try to understand, that when I can, I will’ and ‘Can anybody hear me, I just want to be, me’ pretty much summed out how I felt about everything. I might not have been doing everything right, but I knew someday I would.

‘Spaceboy’: ‘Watch me, death defy, defile my life’ was how I felt about my mom for a long time. I had to sit and watch her hurt herself and could nothing more than watch. ‘And spaceboy they’ll kill me, before I’m dead and gone’ was relevant as well. I always kinda felt that, even though mom’s never heard this song, this is kind of ‘our’ song.

‘Silverfuck’: The immediate attraction was of course the F bomb in the title, but I was kind of indifferent to it for a while. Then I saw the live version and almost died. And maybe this is just me, but the line ‘What I’ve recovered of me, I put into a box, underneath my bed’ sounds like the mythical ‘Heart-shaped box’ of Nirvana fame. Anyone else think that?

‘Sweet Sweet’: I love this. It’s so dreamy and light. ‘Sweet Sweet Sweet little agony, I don’t know just where you’ve been, but I’ll take take take all that you have for me, in sin’ and ‘ And they all want you to change’ make me deliriously, goofy happy.

‘Luna’: ‘I’ll hear your song, if you want me to, I’ll sing along’ *sigh*