On October 23, 1995 The Smashing Pumpkins released their third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. As the album celebrates 25 years, rediscover the music of your past with seven facts about it below.

1. The album cover was changed last minute. The cover of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was supposed to be a picture of the band in Victorian clothing. However, they had to scrap that idea because the price for the photographer was way too high. Instead, John Craig, the artist already working on the art for the inside of the album, was asked to  design the cover.

2. Cast members from SpongeBob SquarePants were in one of the music videos. The voice actors from SpongeBob SquarePants and Karen Plankton, Tom Kenny and Jill Talley, were in the Smashing Pumpkins’ music video for “Tonight, Tonight”. They play the married couple who have their honeymoon on the moon. This was inspired by a 1902 silent film, one of the first sci-fi movies, Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon.

3. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was their best selling album. The record sold over 11 million copies, earning Diamond certification by the RIAA for sales. It’s currently their only album to top the Billboard 200 charts. The band had seven Grammy nominations, a Juno nomination, and many MTV Video Music Awards.

4. That year, Billy Corgan wrote over 50 different songs. While speaking with MTV he said that only a few of them ended up on the album, but in total he had written 56 songs in 1995.

5. Billy Corgan said the album was not originally written for anyone over the age of 24. He told the Chicago Tribune, “It will be totally misunderstood by the plus-30-year-old rock critics. I’m not writing it for them, even though I’m on the edge of losing my connection to youth, as is anyone entering their late 20s, and you’ve got a house, you get married and the things that are important in your life begin to change. But I wanted to communicate from the edge of it, an echo back to the generation that’s coming, 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 rearview mirror. Tying a knot around my youth and putting it under the bed.”

He said that it was written mainly for people between the ages of 14 and 24.

6. “1979” almost didn’t make it on the album. “1979” was the last song written for the album because at the very last minute, Corgan decided that it had potential. “I had a gut feeling about this song from the very beginning,” he said in an interview. “It was almost like I was afraid to go where this song was taking me. It’s the kind of song that if I thought about doing it on previous albums, I’d have questions about whether I’d sound shitty doing it. It’s just not a typical Pumpkins song.”

So when he told their producer, in disbelief Corgan was given 24 hours to make it work, or else it wouldn’t make it cut.

“It really inspired me to finish it and prove him wrong,” he said. “So that night I wrote the entire song in about four hours. The next day Flood heard it one time and said, ‘It’s on the album.'”
Billy Corgan titled it “1979” because it rhymed with a lot of the lyrics he wanted to put in the song.

7. Billy Corgan surprised himself with how dark the album turned out. he had this to say in an interview with Rolling Stone:

“People always say, ‘Oh, it’s dark’, and I would think ‘Eh, it’s not dark to me.’ But now I listen to it years later and I think, ‘Wow, there’s some pretty dark tones. There’s some pretty dark themes.’ A song like ‘X.Y.U.’ and ‘Tales of a Scorched Earth’, those are pretty dark. There’s something about the darkness of it all that really resonated: the tonality of the thing. The production is fairly stark in many places. You listen, to say. ‘Cherub Rock’, which is very layered and nuanced, and then you listen to something like ‘X.Y.U’ which is the band live in the studio. Those are completely different contrasts. So the fact that we were willing to go from one extreme to the other in a short period of time surprises me.”

Revisit the music of your past below.