Pale Horse

"Pale Horse" is a song by The Smashing Pumpkins off of their 2012 studio album, Oceania. Billy Corgan has said the song was written for his mother, in particular the pain both she and he endured after she was committed to an insane asylum when was four years old. Corgan later admitted his mother never shared stories about this period of her life, so the song is more of an interpretation of what Corgan imagined she went through, rather than literal meaning.

A lot of times when you have [this] kind of riff, you don't want to get too tricky. It creates a hypnotic effect. You don't want to change keys too much, so I leaned back on some of those artists who used space well. In old Pumpkins ideology, if you started with that riff, the song would get bigger and louder. In this ideology, it actually gets smaller, and that's how you get the dynamic back up.