Tales of a Scorched Earth
GS: What are your favorite songs from Mellon Collie?
Billy: It pretty much changes all the time. I just took a driving trip, and listened to the whole album for the first time in a couple of months, and stuff jumped out at me that's hadn't before. Like "Tales of a Scorched Earth," which is just a bit about teenage nihilism. When I recorded the song, I had mixed feelings about putting it on the album, but when I just got away from the intellectualizing and just listened to it, I enjoyed it. It's total bombast. Within the context of the whole record, it fits nicely. It's a nice opposing ice cream flavor. My favorite songs are always the ones that are closest to me personally instead of what may be the best "musical" song. I usually don't like the singles as much, but I do like "1979" a lot.
GS: How did you get those unusual voicings on the chorus of "Tales,"?
Billy: I overdubbed an unusually tuned guitar part on the chorus. The G string goes up one half step to G# and the high E strings goes up one whole step to F# [all pitches actually sound on half step lower, as all the guitars are tuned down one half step]. Then the guitar is run through a kind of envelope filter, so it sounds strange.
There's a lot of different things going on during the bridge: there's a regular bass, there's a Fender P-bass played with a pick [playing a different line and sounding like a six-string bass], there's a few guitars played through envelopes, and there's a real scratchy guitar, too. There are about six or seven different instruments happening in there.
1996-Guitar School
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James: We did a lot of layering with E-Bows on this album, too. Like the middle eight in "Here Is No Why"; it's got 14 tracks of these little two-note E-Bow figures. And the song with the most effects pedals, would probably be "Tales Of A Scorched Earth." There's this one ridiculous solo where we had like 20 things chained together and it was just going Unnnnoohhhhh [does a convincing impression of an aroused mastadon] when the guitar wasn't even on. We plugged all this stuff in, then we had to leave the room. It was so loud.
1995 - Guitar World
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Caller: Did you have to put your voice through some kind of a synthesizer for Tales Of A Scorched Earth, or is that really your voice?
Billy: That's actually my voice just super-distorted. When you distort something like a voice, certain frequencies tend to pop out. And since I have such a nasty, whiny, Ozzy-like voice, all those nasty Ozzy-like frequencies jump right out.
1996 - Rockline