‘Something in the Way’: the dark heart of Nirvana
Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain accomplished what most artists fail to do by appealing to the masses with his largely impenetrable lyrics. Most of his lyrical constructions clearly reflect the complex mind that spawned them. Of course, some moments are more straightforward than others, but Cobain’s dark wordplay could be so vague at points that even the puckish frontman was unsure of where they came from. However, one song stands to reflect the dusk native to his core more than any other: ‘Something in the Way’.
The grunge trio weren’t exactly an upbeat band musically, but no track in their oeuvre is as bleak as the 12th track on their hit second album, Nevermind. Featuring a sparse arrangement, with a core of Cobain and acoustic guitar captured on the couch of Butch Vig’s control room, and the despairing moans of the cello, it was majorly depressing when it arrived and afforded a more tangible sense of darkness after the Nirvana mastermind tragically took his own life in April 1994.
Music fans and commentators have trawled hard to find deeper meaning in all of Cobain’s work since his death, which is only natural given his game-changing significance and undisputed artistic brilliance during his life. Yet, when he was openly struggling with fame, and his mental health affected by being in the limelight exacerbated longstanding personal issues, ‘Something in the Way’ put itself forward as the most autobiographical Nirvana track.
It’s an interesting point, given that the song features barely any lyrics and instead rests firmly on the depressive mood of the music. The verse is: “Underneath the bridge, tarp has sprung a leak / And the animals I’ve trapped have all become my pets / And 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”. Following this, the chorus, wherein Cobain’s baritone delivery becomes one with the cello, is: “Something in the way,” followed by agonised melisma.
The general mood of the track is not the only aspect that has been taken as the clearest rendering of Cobain’s glass-half-full personality. The lyrics are supposedly autobiographical and about a particularly tough time in his formative years, which gives the music and lyrics another eerily lifelike quality.
Highly mythologised like many of Nirvana’s tracks, it was once believed that the song—originally written by Cobain in 1990—was inspired by a time when he was homeless and slept under the Young Street Bridge near his childhood home in Aberdeen, Washington. While Cobain did run away a few times during his teenage years to escape the turmoil of his parents’ divorce, both Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and Cobain’s sister Kim have refuted the claim that he slept under the bridge, stating it was physically impossible due to the tide and muddy banks. However, Cobain did spend time there during the day, like many local teenagers.
His biographer, Charles R Cross, writing in Heavier than Heaven, revealed a sad reality for Cobain when he was homeless for roughly four months. It allegedly started with him sleeping like a cat in a cardboard box on the porch of Melvins drummer Dale Crover. Later, Cobain slept in hallways of apartment blocks with central heating and would leave before the residents woke up for work. Elsewhere, he and a friend would hunker down in the waiting room of Grays Harbor Hospital, where he would get food from the cafeteria and put it on the tabs of room numbers.
As came to be expected of Cobain, he would throw a thick cloak of mystery around the already arcane song by telling another biographer, Michael Azerrad, that the lyrics were less autobiographical and more fantasy. He said 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”.
Fact, fiction, or somewhere in between; something about ‘Something in the Way’ represents Kurt Cobain more closely than any other Nirvana song. Just like its author, the composition operates in a realm that is both steeped in the essence of the real while containing a heavy dose of unsettling mythology. Furthermore, given the black shadow Cobain was expert at conjuring in song due to the cognitive one that would hang above him for most of his life, eventually contributing to his end, and the general nature of the Nevermind track, there can be no doubt that it represents the dark, despondent heart of Nirvana most closely.
