Songfacts®:

• This instrumental is the title track and opening track of ATUM, a 33-track collection whose title is pronounced "autumn." The record is billed as a sequel to 1995's Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and 2000's Machina/The Machine of God.
• ATUM is a concept album that frontman Billy Corgan lays out like a movie. It traces the journey of a former rock star of great renown named Shiny, who because he's judged a danger to global and civil society, has been permanently exiled into space.
  
  "Mellon Collie and Machina had both been conceptual albums, so I was like, OK, is there a certain chapter to explore further here?'" Corgan told Uncut magazine. "With Atum, the story takes place 20 years from the present, so the main character in the narrative is 20 years older than myself. Artists are being exiled into space as a way to ameliorate the tension between free speech and government censorship. It's a way to explore things that I would be uncomfortable exploring on my own, and by using different characters I feel greater freedom. At some point you grow past your own opinion to explore a wider world of myth and mystery."
  
  "I kind of fell back in I kind of fell back in love with playing a guitar while making this record," he added. "It seemed to go with a theme that I was after and felt very organic."
• The ATUM CD booklet contains a song-by-song story recap. The write-up for this space-rock opener reads:
  
  "Shiny, alone in the void for over two decades and unseen in his diminutive yet decorative Deco ship made for one, is set cruelly against a cold cosmos. Where in orbit he has spun above the home he can never return to, and where once upon a time he was a controversial, world-class star. His public life having been all but erased from the digital record."
• The song features a piano accompaniment from frequent David Bowie collaborator Mike Garson.