Mayonaise

"Mayonaise" is a song by The Smashing Pumpkins, first officially released on the 1993 breakthrough album Siamese Dream. It was written by Billy Corgan and James Iha and was recorded from December 1992 to March 1993 at Triclops Sound Studios.

Despite having garnered considerable radio play and remaining a fan favorite, "Mayonaise" was never an officially released single. In 2012 it won a Rolling Stone readers poll for "The Best Smashing Pumpkins Songs" by "a significant margin". In 2021, it was voted the #3 most underrated song of all-time by the Ultimate Guitar community.

Composition and equipment
According to Corgan, the whistling sound (feedback) heard in "Mayonaise" came from a cheap guitar he bought, which, whenever he stopped playing it, created the whistling sound. This sound was then incorporated into the song.

Corgan apparently got the title for the song after he looked "in [his] refrigerator". Later, he stated in an interview with a Colombian radio station that the name stands for the phonetics of 'My Own Eyes'. Again at the Gish-aversary event in 2021, he further explained the title originated from the line "Rhinoceros" line,, and not just a play on words with "My Own Eyes".

Iha stated that he "...came up with those chords and did a demo of it, it was an instrumental demo of the song. I played it for Billy and he liked it, he came up with the vocal melody and the lyrics. We worked on the arrangement together." For the intro, Iha used a cheap Kingston guitar he got at a pawnshop, which had "terrible" intonation according to Triclops engineer Jeff Tomei.

The howling feedback heard during the refrains (i.e. at the ~2:01 mark) is from a $65 Kimberly Bison guitar, which Corgan nicknamed "Kimberly Kay". The feedback would occur whenever the guitar wasn't being played, so the band used it to their advantage. Kimberly Kay was also used on "1979", "Panopticon", and "Pissant".

Versions
Several versions of the song are available. Before being officially released on Siamese Dream, an acoustic mix (labeled as an outtake) of the Siamese Dream recording was featured on the Mashed Potatoes box set given to friends in 1993-1994. It was also a part of the official promos Still Becoming Apart and The Smashing Pumpkins 1991-1998, with a slightly phased acoustic guitar part and a tambourine. Most recently, a live acoustic version was released on Earphoria and the Vieuphoria video. The Vieuphoria version, originally broadcast in 1993 on the British television show Naked City, features the band playing the song intertwined with footage of the band.

On the most recent Smashing Pumpkins tribute album, compiled by MySpace and Spin, The Academy Is... covered the song.

The band Emanuel also covered the song on the 2005 Smashing Pumpkins tribute album The Killer in You: A Tribute to Smashing Pumpkins.