Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness - Recording and Production

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' White 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 to forgo working with Butch Vig, who had produced the group's previous albums, and selected Flood and Alan Moulder as co-producers. 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. Originally designed to create a rough draft for the record, the rehearsal space sessions ended up yielding much of the new album's rhythm section parts. Flood also insisted the band set aside time each day devoted to jamming or songwriting, practices the band had never engaged in before 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 that permeated the Siamese Dream recording sessions. Corgan said regarding the problems with recording Siamese Dream, "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 decided to counter idleness by using two recording rooms at the same time. This tactic allowed Corgan to work on vocals and song arrangements while recording was done 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 a much greater role in the recording of the album, unlike the prior albums where Corgan was rumored to have recorded all the bass and guitar parts himself. James Iha commented about the recording sessions,

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 the one recorded for "Beautiful". When the recording sessions concluded, the band had 57 completed songs which were up for contention to be included on Mellon Collie. The album was going to have 32 songs, but this was cut back to 28 songs.