Songfacts®:

• This song is about holding on, even in a time of adversity. It could also be seen as a metaphor for the band, saying "try to hold on" as they were coming apart. The Smashing Pumpkins announced their breakup in 2000 a few months after the song was released (they got back together in 2006).
• The music video, directed by Jonas Akerlund, shows two homeless (yet very attractive) drug addicts who undergo theft, prostitution, and a miscarriage. It's a rather graphic video that didn't get much airtime due to the drug references and violence, but found an audience in the YouTube era.
• The song is part of the 2000 album Machina: The Machines Of God, which was envisioned as a concept album but ended up being more of standard collection of songs.
  
  An alternate version of the song, with alternate lyrics, was released on Machina II: The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music, which was put on the internet for free in September of 2000.
• Lead Pumpkin Billy Corgan talked about writing this song when the band did a VH1 Storytellers episode. He said he started playing it on guitar, and when his girlfriend heard the line "try to hold on," she said, "Must every song you write have to be so sad?"
  
  Corgan explained that it's actually a positive message, like "try to hold on to me as a boyfriend." He also added:
  
  "There's these existential lyrics that try to approximate the way I ordinarily feel. 
  People say the songs don't seem as personal, dramatic or emotional. A song like this, I agree, but that's because everything that's happened in my life has made me feel more distant from my feelings. So when I write a song like 'Try,' I am expressing the way I feel, it's just that people don't understand it."