‘All Apologies’: the evolution of the final single Nirvana ever released
A lot has been made of Kurt Cobain’s guitar style, his Mixolydian progressions and his drained vocals. Less has been said of his impressive control over melody. Unsurprisingly for a self-confessed fan of The Beatles (always Lennon, never McCartney), Cobain was a glutton for neat, memorable melody lines – perfectly offsetting Nirvana’s scuzzy riffs and monochrome lyrics with a bubblegum sheen. Few tracks demonstrate the songwriter’s melodic skill better than ‘All Apologies’, the final track Nirvana released before Cobain’s death.
Writing about ‘All Apologies’ is a tricky business as Cobain barely spoke about the track. That being said, there is a distinct sense that ‘All Apologies’, like so many of the tracks on In Utero, reflects the pressures Cobain felt at the time of writing, some associated with Nirvana’s fame, others with his new family life. However, to claim that this song pinpoints one particular moment toward’s the end of Cobain’s life would be to ignore its previous incarnations. The first demo of ‘All Apologies’ – featured on the 20th-anniversary edition of In Utero – is a roughshod acoustic number bent under the weight of its own false optimism.
In this early version, Cobain seeks to emulate the chirpiness of The Beatles. Though the track’s original lyrics tell of some petty dispute (“You stole things from me/ All apologies/ I stole things from you/ All of us stand accused”), his faintly-psychedelic chord progressions evoke the sun-soaked optimism of the late ’60s, forging a vision of Cobain forcing himself towards a contentedness he knows he isn’t capable of.
In Cobain’s second demo, recorded at his own home, his emphasis is on his domestic environment, foreshadowing the “married/buried” connection that would come to define the album recording. “I don’t want to fight,” he sings in the opening verse, replacing “I don’t have the right”. The privacy of his home setting engenders a greater degree of introspection, giving birth to that looming question, “What else should I be?” as though Cobain can feel the walls of his house, and indeed the walls of the universe, closing in.
This sense of alienation from the world beyond would come to colour the final version of ‘All Apologies’, which became one of the highlights of Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged set in New York. “What else should I be?/ All apologies,” he sings. “What else should I say?/Everyone is gay.” Here, Cobain frames himself as belonging, flesh and bone, to others – all of them cannibals. His one refuge is a place beneath the burning sun, where he finally feels free: “In the sun, I feel as one.”
When the session aired in November 1993, the song must have sounded like Kurt was about to drive headlong into a mid-life crisis, the “married/buried” line in the chorus reflecting anxiety that he had allowed himself to conform. After his suicide in 1994, the track, released on In Utero seven months later, took on a much darker tone. All that time, Cobain had been drowning, not swimming.
