Songoftheday 1/27/20 - The world is a vampire sent to drain, secret destroyers hold you up to the flames...

"Bullet With Butterfly Wings" - Smashing Pumpkins
from the album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #22 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 12

Today's song of the day comes from the alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins, who had reached the Top-40 on the Hot 100 Airplay chart with their cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" in at the close of 1994, but was unable to chart due to Billboard magazine rules requiring Hot 100 pop entries to be available commercially.

The band went back into the studio to create their third studio set Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a sprawling opus that covers two CDs or three records. The lead single from the set was "Bullet With Butterfly Wings", a hard-driving expression of angst that lead singer/writer Billy Corgan was quite good at. Being released as a CD single, it became the band's first official pop hit proper...

"Bullet With Butterfly Wings" reached the American Top-40 in January of 1996. The song spent six weeks at #2 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, while peaking at #4 on the Mainstream Rock list. Internationally, the single topped the chart in Iceland, and reached the top-40 in France (#17), Canada (#18), Ireland (#18), Australia (#19), and the UK (#20). At the 1997 Grammy Awards, the song won them a trophy for Best Hard Rock Performance, although they lost Album of the Year to Celine Dion's Falling For You, and lost Alternative Music Performance to Beck's Odelay.

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Here's the band in 1995 on French TV rolling out the song...