Galapogos

"Galapogos" is a song from The Smashing Pumpkins' third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. On Billy's Gravity Demos I it is titled "The Innocents".

The title is a reference to the Galápagos Islands (intentionally misspelled), made famous by Charles Darwin. Lyrically the song compares the isolation Billy Corgan felt with his marriage to that of the islands which inspired the theory of evolution.

I cannot recall what it was about Darwin’s fabled set of islands that led me to associate my crumbling marriage to them. Perhaps I was wondering if in the lure of a total and disconnected isolation we might better survive the onslaught of life’s ceaseless progress. Idealizing a failed romance can only get you so far, and once engaged I found that somewhere between my idealism and natural compassion for an identified other there lived a truth I was not yet willing to swallow about myself. Cue up my admitting here that one of us was about to be abandoned, never realizing that the desertion would flow both ways. ‘Galapogos’ stands up over time as a remnant of grace that I lost as I wrote it.