The Recording sessions saw a wealth of productivity: dozens of fully completed songs were cut from the album and resurfaced on later releases. A box set released in November 1996 titled The Aeroplane Flies High compiled its promotional singles and around 30 fully completed songs from the Mellon Collie sessions that had not made the final cut (including "Pastichio Medley", a pastiche or medley of about 70 short pieces). Both albums were reissued years later with even more session tracks.
The album was lauded by critics for its ambition and scope, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness earned the band seven Grammy Award nominations in 1997 as well as nine MTV Music Video Awards nominations, and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", "1979", "Tonight, Tonight" and "Thirty-Three" became the band's first Top 40 hits, crossing over to pop radio stations. It has since been regarded as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s and of all time.
After the 13-month tour in support of the Smashing Pumpkins' second album Siamese Dream, Billy Corgan immediately began writing songs for the band's next record. From the outset, the band intended the new record to be a double album, partly inspired by the Beatles' self-titled album. Corgan said, "We almost had enough material to make Siamese Dream a double album. With this new album, I really liked the notion that we would create a wider scope in which to put other kinds of material we were writing." Corgan felt that the band's musical approach was running its course, and wanted the band to approach the album as if it were its last. Corgan described the album at the time to the music press as "The Wall for Generation X", a comparison with Pink Floyd's 1979 album, one of the highest-selling and best-known concept albums of all time.
The band decided against working with Butch Vig, who had produced the group's previous albums, and selected Flood and Alan Moulder as coproducers. Corgan explained, "To be completely honest, I think it was a situation where we'd become so close to Butch that it started to work to our disadvantage... I just felt we had to force the situation, sonically, and take ourselves out of normal Pumpkin recording mode. I didn't want to repeat past Pumpkin work." So Flood immediately pushed the band to change its recording practices. Corgan later said, "Flood felt like the band he would see live wasn't really captured on record". In April 1995, the band began recording in a rehearsal space instead of entering the studio straight away. At these sessions, the band recorded rough rhythm tracks with Flood. Although originally designed to create a rough draft for the record, the rehearsal-space sessions yielded much of the new album's rhythm-section parts. Flood also insisted that the band set aside time each day devoted to jamming or songwriting, practices in which the band had never before engaged during recording sessions. Corgan said, "Working like that kept the whole process very interesting—kept it from becoming a grind."
Corgan sought to eliminate the tension, long hours, and emotional strain that permeated the Siamese Dream recording sessions, the band countered idleness by using two recording rooms at the same time. This tactic allowed Corgan to develop vocals and song arrangements in one room while recording occurred in the other. During these sessions, Flood and Corgan would work in one room as Moulder, guitarist James Iha and bassist D'arcy Wretzky worked in a second. Iha and Wretzky had much greater roles in the recording sessions of Mellon Collie compared to previous albums. This was, in large part, to counter rumours from the Siamese Dream sessions that Corgan was recording all of the bass and guitar parts by himself. Iha commented about how the recording sessions for Mellon Collie improved from that of Siamese Dream.
Following the rehearsal-space sessions, the band recorded overdubs at the Chicago Recording Company. Pro Tools was used for recording guitar overdubs as well as for post-production electronic looping and sampling. Wretzky also recorded numerous backup vocal parts, but all were cut except that which was recorded for "Beautiful". When the recording sessions concluded, the band had 57 potential songs for inclusion on Mellon Collie. The album was originally planned to have 31 songs, but the count was reduced to 28.
The songs on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness are intended to work together conceptually, with the two halves of the album representing day and night. Despite this, Corgan has rejected the term concept album to describe it, and it was at the time described as more "loose" and "vague" than were the band's previous records. He also said it is based on "the human condition of mortal sorrow". Corgan aimed the album's message at people between 14 and 24 years of age, hoping "to sum up all the things I felt as a youth but was never able to voice articulately. ... I'm waving goodbye to me in the rear view mirror, tying a knot around my youth and putting it under the bed."
Musically, the album has been described as featuring alternative rock, grunge, alternative metal, art rock and heavy metal. Its sprawling nature resulted in diverse music styles from song to song, contrasting what some critics felt was the "one dimensional flavor" of the previous two albums. A much wider variety of instrumentation is used, such as piano ("Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness"), synthesizers and drum loops ("1979"), a live orchestra ("Tonight, Tonight") and even salt shakers and scissors ("Cupid de Locke"). All guitars on the album were tuned down a half-step in order to "make the music a little lower," according to Corgan. Corgan and Iha shared soloing duties; Iha estimated that the guitar solo duties were divided "half and half" on the record.
All but two songs on the album were written by Corgan. The closing track from the first disc, "Take Me Down", was written and sung by Iha, while the album's final track, "Farewell and Goodnight", features lead vocals by all four band members and, according to the BMI database, was written solely by Iha, despite being credited on the album liner notes as being written by both Iha and Corgan. Iha wrote additional songs during the making of the album that did not make the final cut.
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