Saturday Morning Soundtrack -- Special Guest Edition!: "Landslide" -- Smashing Pumpkins

Right now, in our rock and roll writing class my students are finding rock music that inspires them and creating flash nonfiction pieces we are calling "Liner Notes" where they try to capture their elusive, sometimes visceral reactions to the music, using lyrical language, a critical eye, and vivid imagery. This week's entry comes from one of those writers, Dominique Bruno.


About Dominique:

"While I was raised on what might be called 'classic rock,' I consider myself relatively open to learning about music as I experience it. My mix for writing term papers is called, 'There are no words' and it is all classical music, with no lyrics.  I love Broadway show tunes that I can sing to, and play 'Name that Tune' with my friends who are ex-theater-geeks.  I like the fact that what I listen to, I
                                                                                           can share with anyone I want.  Most of my mix tapes for friends are full of songs that I heard on the 
                                                                                           radio, or on a podcast, and I said to myself, 'Holy cow, this is amazing, I want so-and-so to hear 
                                                                                           this!' or, 'This reminds me of this person!' I love the fact that music touches people the way that very 
                                                                                           few other things can. Like reading, it is something that I go back to for comfort, and it never fails."

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"Landslide" -- Smashing Pumpkins (1994) (Cover of Fleetwood Mac)

Fun Fact? “Landslide” wasn’t even a single for Fleetwood Mac, until this cover by the Smashing Pumpkins came out.  Now, it’s mainstream enough to have a feature in the Super Bowl commercials this past February.  Billy Corgan (front man to the Smashing Pumpkins) obviously doesn’t have the poignant vocal styles of Stevie Nicks, but there is something perfectly time-ly in Corgan’s rendition that makes it all the more heartbreaking for me.

Nicks has said that she wrote this song while she was contemplating going back to school or continuing on, professionally with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham (who was also for a long time, a romantic partner as well). Polydor Records had just dropped Nicks and she and Buckingham were not getting along. Apparently, she wrote the song while visiting Aspen, Colorado, sitting in someone's living room "looking out at the Rocky Mountains pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us . . . at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.” The song was originally featured as the B-side to their 1994 single "Disarm" and later on their B-side collection Pisces Iscariot.  But this cover went on to be one of the Smashing Pumpkins’s most-beloved tracks and even has Nicks’s endorsement. As she told fans during a 1998 online chat with SonicNet, "There's nothing more pleasing to a songwriter than [someone else] doing one of their songs. ['Landslide'] also led me to being friends with Billy [Corgan] and the possibility that we'll work together. . . . Over this song, there's been this incredible connection . . . he reached out . . . I believe that my poetry is really meant for everyone, no matter what age." It’s interesting that she calls her own lyrics poetry, as well. The cover made it to the top three on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in the U.S. in 1994, and number 30 on the U.S. Airplay charts. The song was also featured on the U.S. version of Smashing Pumpkins’s greatest hits album, Rotten Apples.

I first became familiar with the Smashing Pumpkins in my last years of high school, and it became a bit of a love affair almost immediately.  While this song is not one of their originals, it is quite emblematic of my adoration for good acoustic covers.  Despite the fact that we could mock the Super Bowl commercial here, Corgan sings this song without even the hint of irony, which is awesome. The next time I am at a crossroads in my life, I want to be able to make my decision with the honesty and lack of cynicism that Corgan has here, that makes it--as Nicks says--into “poetry.”

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Please, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. If you would like to write a Guest Entry for the "Saturday Morning Soundtrack" series where you creatively respond to one of your favorite rock songs, don't hesitate to contact me with queries.