100 favourite songs: #86: "Today" - Smashing Pumpkins

The main thing with “Today” is that it’s basically a perfect power-pop song, bittersweet and singalongable (turns out that I still know all the words, after all this time). In high school, to the extent that I did the grunge thing, I was more of a Pearl Jam boy than a Pumpkins or a Nirvana one (though naturally I had the holy documents, Nirvana and Mellon Collie and Siamese Dream, anyway), but even then “Today” made my nerves tingle and caused some nameless want to swell inside me; in the time since then, Siamese Dream has become a bit of a touchstone record for me — I only listen to it at very long intervals, but every time I do it seems to be somehow a key moment, crystallising or exemplifying a particular point in my life while recalling and referring back to the past. I listen to “Today” on its own more frequently (and sometimes other individual songs, usually some combination of “Disarm”, “Soma” and “Mayonaise”), and while it partakes of that reification of the album in my mind, it also bears with it its own set of associations and it’s a rare day when I don’t enjoy turning it up loud and being swept along…