The Dream She Gave Me

My wife introduced me to the Smashing Pumpkins. Before her, I only really knew one of their songs, Bullet With Butterfly Wings. The one with the rat in a cage.

She played me Siamese Dream properly. All the way through. Mayonaise. Disarm. Today. And I understood immediately why this album meant so much to her. It's the kind of record that gets inside you, all that noise and beauty and barely contained sadness, somehow existing simultaneously.

And then I looked at the cover. Two little girls in a garden, one hugging the other from behind, faces covered in sparkles, wearing wings. Warm. Innocent. Gentle. The most un-rock-and-roll cover imaginable for one of the defining rock albums of the 1990s.

That tension, between the cover and the music inside, is exactly what makes it one of the great album covers of its era.

Album Anatomy

Billy Corgan's Vision

The cover photograph was shot by Melodie McDaniel, an independent photographer hired to capture the image that Billy Corgan had in mind.

Corgan's vision for the cover was precise and personal. The album's feelings of nostalgia and yearning for happiness are reflected in its album cover. Picturing two young girls hugging, wearing wings and with large smiles on their faces, the cover immediately appeals to the universal memory of childhood innocence. Its warm colour tones further this feeling of nostalgia, as many often picture their childhood as being brighter compared to the world today.

This was not an accident of styling or a happy coincidence of photography. It was a deliberate statement about what the album was doing emotionally; reaching back toward something simpler, something lost, something that could only exist now as a dream.

Siamese Dream was almost entirely written by Billy Corgan, who was going through an intense period of depression. He channelled his feelings into the album, with many of the songs reflecting his yearning to return to a simpler time when he was happier, before life got hard and he lost his child-like innocence.

Disarm is about his difficult relationship with his parents as a child. Today, the deceptively upbeat single, was written on a day when Corgan was experiencing suicidal thoughts. Mayonaise, yes, deliberately spelled without the second n, in a move that is either a deliberate stylistic choice or a spelling error that nobody caught, and Corgan has never fully clarified is a five minute wall of guitar that sounds like grief given shape.

The cover of two children playing in a garden is not a contrast to all of that. It is the source of it. The thing that was lost. The dream that can't be recovered.

A Perfect LA Afternoon

Billy Corgan later wrote on Facebook his memories of the shoot: "On such a special day in SP history, I want to take a moment to thank Ali and LySandra, who you might know were the little girls that I stood by and watched have their picture taken some 23 years ago on what was a perfect LA afternoon. Never realising that this moment in time would forever tie us, and go on to become such an iconic image in rock history."

A perfect LA afternoon. Two little girls. A photographer. A musician standing to one side, watching, understanding that something true was being captured.

The two girls were Ali Laenger and LySandra Roberts. For years their identities were unknown, one of those lovely mysteries that existed before the internet made everything findable. Fans speculated. Theories circulated. And then, in 2018 when the Smashing Pumpkins announced their reunion tour, the band's promotional team tracked them down and the mystery was finally solved.

Ali Laenger went on to work as both a model and a designer. LySandra Roberts remained more private. The cover is partly about the mystery of childhood. One of its subjects choosing to stay mysterious is its own kind of poetry.

The Conjoined Twins Who Never Were

The title Siamese Dream and the close proximity of the two little girls pictured on the cover led many fans to assume they were conjoined twins. Billy Corgan even seemed to have a little fun with this assumption back in 2007, when he posted that the band were looking for their 1993 cover girls "who are not conjoined anymore, as far as we know."

They were never conjoined. They were just two little girls hugging in a garden on a perfect LA afternoon. But the combination of the album title and the image was too tempting for fans not to construct a mythology around.

Corgan added to the confusion in 2011 when he announced on Twitter that the band's then-bassist Nicole Fiorentino had revealed that she was one of the girls from the Siamese Dream cover. The world was either delighted or confused as they thought that Fiorentino, who was born in 1979, would have been too old to be a little kid in 1993. It's thought now that the whole thing was a Billy Corgan Twitter prank.

Billy Corgan. Trolling his own fanbase. About his own album cover. Twenty years after it was released. Absolutely wonderful.

The Last Minute Scramble

In a blog entry, Corgan discussed the creation of the booklet's interior artwork; a collection of old photographs adorned with the album's handwritten lyrics. "We only have this single afternoon to finish everything, or the album will be pushed back," Corgan wrote. "Any attempt to this point of working with the label to get what I want artwork-wise have proven to be frustrating and disappointing… so it falls on my shoulders at the last second to get it done, and Chris is recruited in because of her art school background."

Chris was Chris Fabian, Corgan's wife at the time. The interior artwork of one of the most celebrated albums of the 1990s was assembled in a single afternoon by Corgan and his wife, scrambling against a deadline, after months of frustration with the label.

The cover photograph was the one thing that came together perfectly, a perfect LA afternoon, two little girls, a photographer who knew what she was doing. Everything else was chaos.

That is, in many ways, the story of Siamese Dream itself. An album made under enormous pressure, in difficult circumstances, by a band that was barely holding together, and somehow producing something remarkable from the wreckage.

What The Cover Actually Says

The cover is not a contrast to the music. It is the music, the yearning at the heart of every song on the album, given visual form. Two children in a garden. Wings. Sparkles. A hug. Everything that gets harder to hold onto as life gets louder and more complicated.

Siamese Dream is used to represent a shared dream between Corgan and the audience, just as the two girls in the image share their time and happiness in childhood. Everyone can relate in some way to childhood longing.

Mayonaise. Disarm. Today. Songs about pain and loss and the impossibility of going back.