How Kurt Cobain Turned Desperation into ‘Something in the Way,’ Nevermind’s Most Complicated Track

Nevermind (1991), acclaimed album by Nirvanahas hits like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” It is “come as you are,” but none of these tracks brought as much difficulty during recording as “Something in the Way.”

Kurt Cobain, who died exactly 29 years ago, on April 5, 1994, wrote the track in 1990 – months before studio work on the album began. His inspiration was his own months of despair and melancholy that he experienced around 1985, when he slept anywhere he could find – in the local bookstore, hospital waiting rooms and even on friends’ porches, as described by Ultimate Classic Rock.

The vocalist and guitarist also spent a fair amount of time under a bridge on the Wishkah River, but he never actually spent the night there, contrary to rumors that circulated during the band’s rise.

“I imagined what it would be like if I was living under the bridge and dying of AIDS. I couldn’t move, I was like a person on the street. That was the kind of fantasy behind it,” cobain explained about “Something in the Way.”

“Under the bridge / There’s already one more leak / And the animals I caught / They’ve all become my pets / And I’m living on grass / And on drops that come down from the ceiling / But it’s okay to eat fish / After all, they don’t has feelings,” say the first lines of the song.

Capture the melancholy of “Something in the Way” in the studio was not a simple task. Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and the producer Butch Vig tried to bring the idea of Kurt for the dynamics of the band. After trying to record with different arrangements without success, the vocalist went to the control room and played alone, with an acoustic guitar.

“He played his five-string acoustic guitar, which he never tuned, but it had a unique sound, almost like a ukulele. It gave it so much personality. He sang in a whisper, you could hear a pin drop. I unplugged the phone, turned off the air. -conditioning, I positioned the microphones, and he recorded it right there. There were three takes on the couch in the control room,” vig stated in the book Classic Rock Albums: Nirvana – Nevermind.