Glass and the Ghost Children

"Glass and the Ghost Children" is a song from The Smashing Pumpkins' fifth studio album, Machina/The Machines of God. This middle section of the album features various clips from "Le Deux Machina" with piano by Mike Garson.

Machina served as a concept album in which "the band had become such cartoon characters at that point in the way we were portrayed in the media, the idea was that we would sort of go out and pretend we were the cartoon characters." From there, a story was conceived revolving around a rock star named Zero (based on the public persona of Billy Corgan) hearing the voice of God, renaming himself Glass, and renaming his band The Machines of God. Fans of the band were referred to as the "Ghost Children".

Background
In the Thirty-Three podcast, Corgan for the first time touched on the meaning of the song and the larger Glass and The Machines of God story. He explained that "Glass and the Ghost Children" tells the story of Glass' female love interest, who was drugged up and crashed her car and nearly died, similar to the music video and story that was created for "Try, Try, Try." The song describes when Glass went to visit her in the hospital, as she's hallucinating from the drugs. The end section of the song is meant to directly portray her hallucinations. 

The final product of the song, in particular the first section, was recorded live off the performance floor with Corgan on bass and the usual James Iha on guitar and Jimmy Chamberlin on drums. Vocals were added later.

Equipment
A Gretsch Silver Jet with a Bigsby tremolo was used as Corgan's electric guitar in the studio recording, while James Iha likely used his Gibson SG.