Songfacts®:

• The closing track of Oceania dates back to a demo that Billy Corgan did with the late Mark Tulin of The Electric Prunes during Smashing Pumpkins' original Teargarden sessions. Corgan described the original demo to Music Radar as, "just like a country song - very twangy, like early '70s Byrds."
• After Tulin passed away of a heart attack in February 2011, Corgan went through the tapes of all the stuff they did, looking for forgotten riffs and also taking a walk down memory lane of how the late bassist had impacted his life. I came across the song," he recalled to Music Radar, "and I thought, 'I've just got to do something.' I specifically remember Mark, when I came up with the idea for the song, he was like, 'I love these chords! It's so cool, the way you put the chords together.' He would always say, 'How do you come up with this s--t?' [laughs]"
  
  "To write an entire song around one chord sequence," he continued, "essentially - there's one minor bridge in there - nine-tenths of the song is that same sequence over and over again. It's kind of got a hymn aspect to it. I really like it in that sense because it reminds me of Mark and how he's affected my journey. It's a kind of a sad ending to the record - I didn't intend that, but it's just the way it worked out."
• Oceania is an "album within an album," a phase of Corgan's conceptual Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, which was based on the four phrases of 'The Fool's Journey,' a version of the tarot cards. "It's what's called the hero's journey or the fool's journey. You start from a place of innocence and you're happy. The first card of the tarot is the Fool, and the Fool is standing on a cliff, and he's like, 'La la, life is wonderful,'" explained Corgan to NME. "And the last card of the tarot deck is the World card, which is you know everything or you've learned all you need to know. But in the progression of that you have to go through all this disappointment and betrayal to learn in order to become a child again in your mind."
• Corgan told Billboard magazine that Oceania is intended to exist as a standalone project within the larger Teargarden concept. "I reached a point where I saw that the one-song-at-a-time idea had maxed itself out," he explained. "I just saw that we weren't reaching the sort of casual person who still gets their information from traditional sources. So I thought, 'What do I need to do?' and then I thought, 'OK, I'll go back to making an album.'"