It’s rough being a fanboy when your favorite band often finds ways to redeem even the (few) songs that you never liked all that much and thus have been able to diss when others accuse you of unconditional band-love.

So it is with me and “The Crying Tree of Mercury”. To the album track I was indifferent, but of the released-on-MySpace studio piano version (3MB mp3) and the 2007 live acoustic performances I think frustratingly highly. Mr. Corgan dispenses with meter and trusts himself to make the song work in the moment, thus bringing to mind another of my favorite rock artists, Dave Doughman of Swearing at Motorists non-fame, who’s made quite a non-career for himself out of doing that all the time, as here (YouTube). Yeah, I never thought I’d have cause to make that comparison, but there it is.

And, please, I don’t even want to talk about how I sort of like the 2007 live version of “Glass and the Ghost Children”. Of course, as the age of this blog approaches infinity, odds are that I will. Sigh.

Below: “The Crying Tree of Mercury”, solo acoustic by BC, in Asheville (Google)