Smashing Pumpkins - “Shame” off Adore

Adore is my favorite Smashing Pumpkins album, but it’s hardly fair to call it a Smashing Pumpkins album. Billy Corgan has said that 97% of any SP album was him and (drummer) Jimmy Chamberlin, and Adore is the only one that Chamberlin was not involved with. Do the math: Adore is really Corgan’s first solo project. He wrote all the songs (the first time he didn’t collaborate with guitarist James Iha on at least one track) and played the vast majority of what’s recorded on the album—guitar, piano, keyboards.

So I have this conception of Adore as sort of the ultimate product of Corgan’s obsession with music, and what he wanted the Smashing Pumpkins to be all along. Critics saw it as a complete departure from Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie, but I think that, given he had to replace Chamberlin with a drum machine, Corgan stayed remarkably true to his earlier work.

Anyway: “Shame” is a track that I almost overlooked when I played this album to death in high school, so I’m giving it some attention now. Its noir-ish simplicity is characteristic of Adore. And I have this hunch that Corgan played all the guitars.