Some songs work best if you don’t listen to it. Not literally, obviously. You have to listen to it. That’s the whole mechanism, but you have to listen to it the way most people listen to most things, which is to say: passively, structurally, as a shape rather than a text. Today is the platonic ideal of this kind of song. It is, by any reasonable metric, one of the happiest-sounding singles of 1993, a year that also gave us a song about runaway children and another about a father touching his daughter. It has a riff that sounds like sunlight through a windshield. It was, for a while, the unofficial jingle of every rock radio station’s “feel good” block. And it is a song about wanting to die.
This is not subtext. Billy Corgan has said as much, repeatedly, in the flat, slightly aggrieved tone he uses for most retrospective interviews, the tone of a man who suspects you weren’t listening the first time either. He wrote Today on a day he considered among the worst of his life, a day inside a longer stretch of what he’s since described in terms that map cleanly onto clinical depression, and the joke — because it is a joke, albeit one delivered with a completely straight face — is that he named it after the version of that day he was performing for everyone else. Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known. Said by someone who means it, this is a greeting card. Said by someone who is lying to your face while smiling, it’s closer to a hostage tape.
Writer Ned Raggett gets at something real when he calls the lyric “a sly joke but also not an apparent one.” That gap between sly and apparent is where the entire song lives. Most protest songs, most confessional songs, most sad songs, want you to know they’re sad. They telegraph it. Minor key, slowed tempo, a vocal that cracks in the second verse right on cue. Today refuses every one of these signals. It opens with a guitar chime that Raggett accurately compares to a soft glam-rock descent, something you could imagine T. Rex doing between cigarettes, and then it just keeps being pretty. The verses are hushed and almost tender. Corgan’s voice, that nasal, wounded-choirboy instrument he spent the entire Siamese Dream album weaponizing, sounds here like it’s trying not to wake anyone up. It’s the vocal equivalent of tiptoeing.
And this is the part that I think gets lost when people talk about Today as a “sad song hiding in a happy song” — as if it’s some kind of Trojan horse, some clever little trick Corgan pulled on unsuspecting alt-rock radio listeners in 1993. That framing makes it sound like a magic trick, a wink. But if you actually sit with the lyric, the horse isn’t hiding anything. It’s telling you exactly what’s inside it. I’ll burn my eyes out before I get out. I’ll tear my heart out before I get out. These aren’t coded lines. They are about as blunt as songwriting gets. The “trick,” if there is one, isn’t that the words are secretly dark. It’s that darkness, delivered cheerfully enough, in a major key, over a chord progression that resolves the way pop songs are supposed to resolve, simply doesn’t register as darkness to most people. We don’t process lyrics on their own. We process them riding on top of the music, and the music here is doing everything in its power to reassure you that whatever’s being said, it’s fine, it’s all fine, today is the greatest day.
This is, I’d argue, a more honest representation of what depression actually sounds like from the outside than almost any explicitly “sad” song you could name. Nobody who is actually struggling walks around telling people in a minor key. They walk around sounding like Today. They say they’re fine. They make the joke. They say “can’t complain” in the tone people use when they mean the opposite, and everyone nods and moves on, because the tone did its job — it signaled “nothing to see here” even while the content underneath was doing something else entirely. Corgan didn’t invent this dynamic; he just had the good sense, or the bad luck, or maybe just the songwriting instinct, to build a three-minute-twenty-one-second monument to it.
There’s also something worth saying about Jimmy Chamberlin’s drumming here. The record is, structurally, one guy’s vision executed almost entirely alone in a room — and then Chamberlin’s drums come in and do the one thing a single, isolated, depressed person cannot do for themselves, which is provide momentum from outside. The song needs that outside push precisely because its narrator can’t generate his own. That’s not a music-theory observation, particularly, but I think it’s true anyway.
I’ve always found it a little funny — sly, if we’re borrowing Raggett’s word — that Today became such a durable “feel-good” song regardless. It shows up at weddings sometimes. I promise you it has been played, unironically, at graduation parties. And honestly, I don’t think that’s a failure of listening so much as it’s proof of how effective the con actually is. The song wants to be misheard. It was built for misreading, the same way Corgan himself has always seemed to want to be simultaneously known and completely misunderstood, a guy who titled his memoir-adjacent liner notes with the emotional transparency of someone in crisis and then got mad when people took him at his word.
I return to the bridge often — “I want to turn you on,” repeated four times, stripped of the verse’s specificity, before the song crashes back into its chorus one final time. It’s the closest the song gets to admitting there’s someone else in the room. Not a diary entry anymore, but an address, a hand reaching toward another person. And then it’s gone, swallowed by the last triumphant round of “today is the greatest day.“ The song doesn’t resolve the tension between the two moods so much as it just runs out the clock on you. Not even three-and-a-half minutes, and you’re left standing there with a hook in your head and no idea what you just agreed to.
That, more than the chord progression or the glam-adjacent riff or even Chamberlin’s drums, might be Today‘s real trick: it convinces you that you understood it. Most people who’ve heard this song a hundred times could sing you the chorus right now without ever having really reckoned with what the chorus is doing. Which feels, in its own way, like the most fitting possible tribute to the thing the song is actually about.
Today deals with suicidal ideation — this is a sensitive topic. If you’re going through something difficult yourself, I’m glad to help point you toward support and resources; just say the word. I’ll fight with you in the darkness.
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