"Mayonaise" is a song by The Smashing Pumpkins, first officially released on the 1993 breakthrough album Siamese Dream. It was written by Billy Corgan and James Iha and was recorded from December 1992 to March 1993 at Triclops Sound Studios. According to Corgan, the whistling sound (feedback) heard in "Mayonaise" came from a cheap guitar he bought, which, whenever he stopped playing it, created the whistling sound. This sound was then incorporated into the song. Corgan apparently got the title for the song after he looked "in [his] refrigerator".[1]
Despite having garnered considerable radio play and remaining a fan favorite, "Mayonaise" was never an officially released single. In 2012 it won a Rolling Stone readers poll for "The Best Smashing Pumpkins Songs" by "a significant margin".[2]
Contents[]
Composition[edit][]
Iha stated that he "...came up with those chords and did a demo of it, it was an instrumental demo of the song. I played it for Billy and he liked it, he came up with the vocal melody and the lyrics. We worked on the arrangement together."[3]
In the 2008 documentary If All Goes Wrong, when talking about "Mayonaise" Corgan downplayed Iha's contributions to the song, attributing only "minor aspects of the chord structures, essentially, but it's really only two parts" and says Iha "gets a lot of credit, probably undue" for writing a "fucking fantastic" song "because his name is on the credit but I wrote the song."[4]
Music[edit][]
The song begins with a soft guitar intro lasting for about a minute. The guitars in the verses and chorus/solo segments of the song are extremely distorted and are characterized as having a heavy, spacey, and dreamy sound.
Versions[edit][]
Several versions of the song are available. Before being officially released on Siamese Dream, an acoustic mix (labeled as an outtake) of the Siamese Dream recording was featured on the Mashed Potatoes box set given to friends in 1993-1994. It was also a part of the official promos Still Becoming Apart and The Smashing Pumpkins 1991-1998, with a slightly phased acoustic guitar part and a tambourine. Most recently, a live acoustic version was released on Earphoria and the Vieuphoria video. The Vieuphoria version, originally broadcast in 1993 on the British television show Naked City, features the band playing the song intertwined with footage of the band.
On the most recent Smashing Pumpkins tribute album, compiled by MySpace and Spin, The Academy Is... covered the song.
The band Emanuel also covered the song on the 2005 Smashing Pumpkins tribute album The Killer in You: A Tribute to Smashing Pumpkins.