#365songs (114 / 365)

I never got big into the Smashing Pumpkins but I always thought this song was great. Listening to it now, it's lyrically kind of a lot in that painfully earnest overwrought way that probably landed better with teenage me than it does with adult me, but yeah... it's still pretty good. I didn't have the kind of childhood that makes me say "yeah, this song really speaks to my experience,"so I really just like it as a song. I think what I like most about it — certainly the first thing I think about when I try to explain why this song does it for me more than any other Pumpkins song — is the bells in that little three-note descending riff: such a nice and relatively light touch that adds a lot. In contrast, the strings feel like laying it on a little thick. It's interesting to think about how in 1996, or whenever I heard this, it was probably super novel to hear strings like that in a rock song on mainstream radio, but now it feels cliché or emotionally manipulative. It's fine. I think the record shows I have a pretty good tolerance for high emotional melodrama in a lyric and vocal delivery, and this song has all that in spades.