Something in the Way

"Something in the Way" was written by Cobain in 1990. The earliest known version is a solo electric demo that appears in a medley, along with the abandoned compositions "You Can't Change Me" and "Burn My Britches," first released on the Cobain compilation Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings in November 2015. The first live performance was on November 25, 1990, at The Off Ramp Café in Seattle.

"Something in the Way" was first recorded in the studio in May 1991 at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California by Butch Vig, for the band's second album, Nevermind. According to Vig, Cobain had originally wanted to record the song's instruments with the full band, but when initial attempts at this were unsuccessful, Cobain sat on a couch in the control room of studio A and played the song for Vig on acoustic guitar, to show him how he thought it should sound.[6] Vig was impressed with the way Cobain's solo rendition sounded, and after turning off the air-conditioning and unplugging the telephone in the control room, set up microphones and recorded the song this way instead, starting with the guitar and the vocals.[6][7]

This became the core of the recording, with the first vocal take being used for the verses.[7] Cobain then recorded vocal harmonies, and drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic added their parts,[6] though both Grohl and Novoselic had difficulty playing in time with Cobain's performance. Novoselic also had trouble tuning his bass to Cobain's guitar, a 12-string Stella acoustic with five nylon guitar strings that Cobain had never tuned, and Grohl had to play more quietly than he was used to, to match the song's gentle mood. "Kurt and I wanted the drums to be very understated," Vig recalled. "Dave was used to playing much louder; plus, it can be very difficult to go back and lay drums over an acoustic guitar track, as the meter may vary a bit".[7] Cobain's harmonies, the bass and the drums were recorded in studio B, a smaller room down the hall from the larger one they generally worked in. On the final day of the Nevermind sessions, Kirk Canning, a friend of the band's they had met through L7, added cello to the recording,[6] although he too had difficulties tuning to Cobain's guitar.

On November 9, 1991, a version of the song was recorded by Miti Adhikari for the BBC program The Evening Session at Maida Vale Studios in London, England. This electric version, which featured heavy drumming during the choruses, was more reminiscent of the way the song usually sounded when performed in concert.[7]

The song was performed as part of Nirvana's MTV Unplugged concert on November 18, 1993 at Sony Music Studios in New York City. This version featured Pat Smear on second guitar and Lori Goldston on cello. It was the final time "Something in the Way" was performed live.

"Something in the Way" was originally believed to be based on a period when Cobain was homeless and slept underneath the Young Street Bridge, close to his childhood home in his native town of Aberdeen, Washington.[6] While Cobain did run away from home as a teenager, the belief that he slept under the bridge was refuted by both Novoselic and Kurt's sister, Kim Cobain, in the 2001 Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven.[8] Both confirmed that Cobain "hung out" under the bridge, which was a popular recreation area favored by local teenagers, but Novoselic told author Charles R. Cross that the river's "tides" and "muddy banks" would have made staying there for a prolonged period of time impossible. Cross argued that the much larger Sixth Street Bridge, located about half-a-mile away, would have been more suitable to sleep under, but is unlikely to have been used by Cobain.[8]

According to Cross, the reality of Cobain's situation during his approximately four-month period of homelessness was "more poignant" than the version presented in "Something in the Way." At first, Cobain slept "curled up like a kitten" in a cardboard refrigerator box on the porch of Dale Crover, drummer of local band, the Melvins. After this, he would sleep in the hallways of old apartment buildings with central heating, leaving before the residents of the building left their apartments. Occasionally, he and a friend would watch television and sleep in the waiting room of Grays Harbor Hospital, with Cobain getting food from the cafeteria by charging it to invented room numbers.[8]

Cobain himself suggested that the song wasn't necessarily autobiographical, telling Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad that the lyrics were "like if I was living under the bridge and I was dying of AIDS, if I was sick and I couldn't move and I was a total street person. That was kind of the fantasy of it".[9]

In Azzerad's 1993 biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Cobain stated that he used to fish from the Wishkah River close to this bridge, which may have inspired the lyric, 'Its okay to eat fish, cos' they don't have any feelings' in the song.[10]

In 2015, Rolling Stone listed the song at number five on their ranking of 102 Nirvana songs.[11] In 2019, The Guardian placed it at number 12 in their list of Nirvana's 20 greatest songs.[12]

In 2017, to mark what would have been Kurt Cobain's 50th birthday, the Phonographic Performance Limited released a list of the top twenty most played Nirvana songs on the TV and radio in the UK in which "Something in the Way" was ranked at number seventeen.[13]

In August 2020, the song reached number 18 on Amazon Music's Best Sellers in Songs chart, and number 19 on iTunes' top 200 songs chart, after appearing in the first trailer for the film, The Batman.[3][14][5]

A brief cover of the song, performed by Jerry O'Connell in the role of Frank "Cush" Cushman, appears in the 1996 romantic comedy Jerry Maguire, directed by Cameron Crowe. The intentionally poor rendition appears during a hotel room scene in which "Cush disrupts football business talk with a nasally, out-of-tune take on Nirvana’s darkest track off Nevermind," according to Ashley Zlatopolsky of Billboard.[15]

The Nevermind version appears in the 2005 war drama Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes. According to Universal Pictures president of film music Kathy Nelson, Mendes had insisted on the song, but a then-ongoing dispute between Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, and surviving Nirvana members had made the licensing of Nirvana songs difficult at the time. However, Love allowed the song's use due to being a "huge fan" of Mendes and actor Peter Sarsgaard. “That’s why it’s probably the first Nirvana song you’ve heard in a movie,” Nelson said.[16]

On April 24, 2020, American musician Post Malone performed the song during his 15-song Nirvana tribute concert, which was livestreamed on YouTube and raised more than $4 million for the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.[17][18]

The version featured in the August 2020 The Batman trailer is a remix of the studio version by the film's composer Michael Giacchino, which integrates additional orchestral elements.[19][20]

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Wikiquote has quotations related to: Nevermind

• Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics