Let Me Give The World To You
"SO WHERE'D YOU HIDE ALL THE ROCK SONGS?
"We took two rock singles off the album because we felt they were anti-album. I did one track with Rick Rubin called "Let Me Give the World to You," but it was too much straight-on rock 'n' roll to fit the feel of the album. We also had this song, "Cash Car Star" that our management felt is a total alternative-rock-radio hit. It was just too heavy. This from the beginning was a creative artistic thing, and I feel really good that we stuck to that. It's as close was we've ever come to complete, we-don't-care-what-anyone-thinks artistic integrity." -Billy
1998 Request
----
The performance is simple and tender - just Billy Corgan crooning his pinched tenor over the solitary shimmer of his acoustic guitar. Circular in its chord patterns, straightforward, at least on the surface, in its romantic sentiment, "Let Me Give the World to You" is the last song to be recorded for the Smashing Pumpkins' forthcoming album, Adore. But for all the naked clarity of this first take, the singer and guitarist senses deeper, stranger possibilities in the tune as he listens to a playback, his white, shaved head bent deep in thought in Studio A at Sound City in Van Nuys, California - the same room, coincidentally, where Nirvana recorded Nevermind.
"I can see where this is going," Corgan says sharply as the tape ends; he turns to producer Rick Rubin: "It's a nice Pumpkins pop song. But I can see it somewhere else, breaking up into something different." Corgan illustrates his point by swinging his arms to one side, as if he's throwing pieces of the song around the control room.
"Do you have any idea what that something is?" Rubin asks. "We can do something basic, just you and a click track. Then you can add and subtract ideas." Rubin has been invited by Corgan, who produced other trakcs on Adore, to take the reins for this final number. And Rubin does so with sunny patience, gently prodding the chief Pumpkin to be more explicit about his ambitions for "Let Me Give the World to You."
Corgan, dressed in black from neck to toe, fishes for a reference point and comes up with the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever." "It's a pop song," he says, "but then all this strange stuff goes on in it, things dropping in and out. I know what we have can be a good pop song. I want to see how fucked-up it can be."
-
So it is with "Let Me Give the World to You." It takes three hours of going nowhere fast - including Corgan's aborted passes at the song on piano and unsuccessful experiments with tape speed and echo - to persuade Corgan, Iha and D'arcy to try the obvious: playing together in real time. As Iha threads the melody with ethereal fills on a Hammond organ and guest drummer Joey Waronker, from Beck's band, hits a tribal pulse, "Let Me Give the World to You" quickly ripens into something special. The spooky pneumatic tension of the group's attack fleshes out the melancholy and irony lacing Corgan's lyrics.
One night and fifty-eight takes later, the Pumpkins decide they've played the song to near perfection; they end up editing a composite track from the best performances. But Rubin figures the initial false starts were worth the trouble. "If you have a great song, you can make twenty records out of it," he says smiling through his long, thick beard.
98 Rolling Stone