Wishing You Were

sWishing You Were is kind of a bizarre song in the Pumpkins canon, because it ends up in a few different places along the line, but never really in its own rite as a song.

There are two demo versions of the song, the first, on the first Mellon Collie Demo tape, is based on a few piano chords that repeat and stretch along, making the song seem much longer than it's three minutes, while Billy emotes semi-blandly, with pretty sappy lyrics that never got past a first edit.

The second demo version is on the second Mellon Collie Demo tape, and adheres to the guitar/drum machine style.  This version has the same basic structure as the piano demo, including what sounded like awkward pauses in the original.  There are no lyrics in this version, just the guitars repeating the riffs they play over the basic chords.

Some of the lyrics in the piano demo end up at the end of The Aeroplane Flies High:

wishing you were real to me

wishing i could make believe
i'll take my secrets to the grave
safely held beneath the waves

With slight variation, of course.  But this appropriation is tiny compared to the other.

I was pretty surprised the first time I heard the guitar version, as I'm sure anyone who has heard it was, as the guitar riff was reused note for note in the 'loud' version of For Martha a few years later.  It's an incredibly fascinating discovery, as it shows how important riff-libraries really are to a prolific band like the Pumpkins.  The demo seems so much like a throwaway, it's really weird to think that Billy was writing For Martha and just thought "oh yeah, that one demo we did on that one tape three years ago. That would go great here."  But then, most likely Billy remembered when writing For Martha that that part of the song shared the chords with an older tune, and happily remembered which one.