“The Everlasting Gaze” by The Smashing Pumpkins

"The Everlasting Gaze" throws open MACHINA/The Machines of God, the Smashing Pumpkins' fifth studio album, and in 1999 it went out as the record's first North American single. Billy Corgan wrote it alone and produced it with Flood, Howard Willing recorded it and Alan Moulder joined them on the mix, and the guitar tone is the shock of the thing: a buzzsaw squall wrung out of a little Crate practice amp that somehow sounds big enough to flatten an arena.

Under the blitz, Corgan has said, the song is about spirituality, about finding his place in the universe and making peace with his limits, and he was clear that he had stopped writing for tortured teenagers. Jonas Åkerlund directed the video, which got heavy rotation, yet the international release was scrapped and "Stand Inside Your Love" went out instead.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.