Lovers In Love With The Sound

The Smashing Pumpkins “Cupid de Locke (BT 2012 Mix)”

Box sets and reissues come out all the time, and they’re always full of early, messy versions of the songs you love. You think you want to hear a demo or a rough take, but with few exceptions, they aren’t anything special, and you put them away after you satisfy your curiosity. The new Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness actually does contain some truly outstanding early demos that are notably different from the final album recordings, but pretty much all of them have been in circulation as acoustic demos for years, and are already in the collection of the sort of hardcore fans who would be willing to pay $$$ for a Mellon Collie box set.

But that’s not all that’s there. Yes, there’s a lot of fetal versions of songs, but there’s a few revised versions of songs. The best and most remarkable of these is a new mix of “Cupid de Locke,” one of the loveliest and most experimental tracks on the record. Corgan hasn’t done anything to change the character of the song besides omitting the spoken word outro, for the most part it’s the same song with a slightly adjusted arrangement. There’s a bit more space in it now, which gives the lovely melodies a bit more space in the mix. It’s less cluttered, more ethereal. The production on the song always sounded a little ahead of the curve, but now it sounds fully contemporary, well over a decade after it was recorded. The song was always meant to be this over the top vision of idealized love, and now that is just a bit clearer.

Buy it from Amazon.