How Nirvana Saved One of Their Darkest, Underrated Songs From the Cutting Room Floor

For a brief moment in the spring of 1991, one of the darkest, most underrated songs in the Nirvana catalogue almost met its final fate on the cutting room floor. The process of saving that song from its unheard ending is a testament to producer Butch Vig’s ability to pull the best out of the pioneering grunge band.

Videos by American Songwriter

With the exception of a hidden track called “Endless, Nameless,” the nearly excluded song closes out Nirvana’s monumental 1991 album, Nevermind, and captures the brooding, melancholic songwriting of frontman Kurt Cobain in a haunting way.

How Nirvana Saved One Of Their Darkest Songs From Obscurity

Part of the allure of Nirvana was their ability to juxtapose incredibly dark, somber lyricism with powerful, driving rock arrangements that almost made it easy to forget just how bleak the songs actually were. But the closing track off Nevermind wasn’t in the business of juxtaposing the light and dark. “Something In the Way” was all dark, all brood, and the band struggled to capture the essence of the song Kurt Cobain was after with the entire band playing all at once. After running through several takes of the song, Cobain still couldn’t find what he was looking for. In some cases, this might lead to a band cutting the track from the record and trying something else.

Vig asked Cobain to come into the control room and demonstrate what he was after. The Nirvana frontman brought in his acoustic guitar, sat down, and began playing what would become one of the band’s darkest songs. Eager to capture the moment in its rawest form, Vig stopped Cobain and started turning off noisy electrical components of the studio, like the telephone and air conditioning unit. Vig set up microphones in front of Cobain and asked him to begin again. With Vig recording this time, Cobain tracked the parts to what would become the album version of “Something In the Way.”

Drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic added their parts after Cobain was done. It wasn’t their typical way of tracking songs in the studio, but the results speak for themselves. The closing track to Nevermind is an intimate look into the shadowy depths of Cobain’s mind and a desolate, albeit poetically exaggerated, depiction of the singer-songwriter’s life pre-Nirvana.

The Song Solidified Lore Around Frontman Kurt Cobain

Nirvana frontman and singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain was no stranger to diving into tough topics, whether his own mental health, society at large, his physical ailments, or the psyches of sociopathic criminals, á la “Polly.” Besides that last track, which recounts the harrowing story of a man kidnapping, torturing, and nearly killing a young girl, one of the darkest Nirvana songs, “Something In the Way,” feeds into lore surrounding Cobain’s life pre-Nirvana and pre-fame. In the mid-1980s, still several years before Nirvana would become the biggest band of the decade, Cobain was couch-surfing, crashing on friends’ front porches, and, occasionally, sleeping under the North Aberdeen Bridge.

Although this living arrangement didn’t last for a long time, relatively speaking, Cobain’s haunting lyrics recount the experience as if he had spent his entire life living under a tarp in western Washington state. Underneath the bridge, tarp has sprung a leak, and the animals I’ve trapped have all become my pets. I’m living off of grass and the drippings from my ceiling. It’s okay to eat fish ‘cause they don’t have any feelings.

The track is a classic in Nirvana’s discography, and if not for the quick thinking of Butch Vig, might have never existed in any other form besides rough demo recordings.

Photo by Geoffrey Swaine/Shutterstock