As I’ve matured as a parent, I’ve come to terms with the fact that there are a lot of common dad activities and responsibilities that I’m just not very good at: sports, hunting and fishing, general machismo, and anything that requires a working knowledge of carburetors. These are areas I’ve tried to fake it until I made it — and never made it. But there are things I am more qualified for than most dads, and one of those is music appreciation.

Taste is a very subjective thing, but I know with overwhelming, arrogant certitude that my taste is quantifiably good, and thus I have a responsibility to pass that taste on to my children, portioned out over adolescence in the appropriate timing. I also frequently try to push that taste on this group, which brings me to my point.

The Smashing Pumpkins are, without question, in the small circle of the greatest 90s rock bands of all time. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, their magnum opus, is a sprawling, erratic, and unreasonably beautiful double-disc record that spans genre, tone, and emotional bandwidth. I explained this to Jude (my 14-year-old) on our drive home this evening in what can only be described as an excited barf of musical consciousness. Now that I’ve had a moment to think these thoughts in the way I do best (written on digital paper), I can offer a slightly more refined take.

Mellon Collie was a $30 purchase in the mid-90s, which I had to pay on three separate occasions due to a combination of theft and misguided religious fervor. That’s a significant investment for a teenager working weekends for minimum wage. (And recently once again for the ridiculously expensive vinyl.) But it was worth every cent. This isn’t just an album — it’s a cathedral of adolescent anguish and euphoria, built track by track with reverence and reckless abandon. It’s sprawling, overindulgent, heartbreaking, weird, loud, and tender, often within the same three minutes. It is, in the best sense, too much.

Plenty of bands in the 90s had ambition, but few had the nerve (or stamina) to chase it into something this sprawling. The Pumpkins did, and somehow, they caught it. From the aching piano of the title track to the anthemic angst of “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” from the glittering hope of “1979” to the scorched-earth nihilism of… well… “Tales of a Scorched Earth”, this album swings a wrecking ball between beauty and brutality without permission or apology. It doesn’t try to sound cool — it tries to sound true.

It’s not great in spite of its excesses; it’s great because of them. It proved that rock could be cinematic, literary, and deeply emotional without losing its bite, at a time when Gen-X was leaning into cynicism and the slow rot of burnout. The general mood in grunge was to pretend you didn’t care if the world burned down. Mellon Collie dared to dare to feel things — earnestly, unashamedly, and at full volume.

This album was a companion when I was alone, and a mirror when I was looking for a way out. Sometimes it comforted me. Sometimes it dragged me deeper. Thirty years later, nothing’s changed in that. If you were a kid in the 90s — feeling too much, caring too much, wanting more than your hometown or your headphones could hold — Mellon Collie let you know you weren’t the only one. That still matters. And if I do my job right, my kids will understand that too. Maybe not today, but eventually. Probably somewhere around track 12.