The Nirvana song Krist Novoselic called “a huge pain in the butt”
For many recording purists, it’s recording to tape or nothing at all. Rock and roll has always been known as a dirty genre, so why try to clean it up when putting everything into a computer? The entire heart of rock and roll is all about being a little bit rough around the edges, but using a computer for the first time became a blessing and a curse when Nirvana cut the song ‘Something in the Way’.
Before the grunge icons had even started putting their tracks together, it was clear that Kurt Cobain was moving in a different direction. He still had that punk edge to much of his songwriting, but the differences between pieces like ‘About A Girl’ from their debut album Bleach and ‘Come As You Are’ are like night and day.
The band were already ready to explode, but they had to record multiple tracks over when Chad Channing was let go behind the drumkit. It might not have been easy, but some celestial magic seemed to happen when they chose Butch Vig to work with them on their second record.
With Dave Grohl now behind the kit, the songs felt like anthems before they even hit primetime, especially the humungous stomp of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. They were all focused on intense emotions, but no one knew how to approach the album’s final track, a slow, plodding piece featuring just two chords.
When the band weren’t getting it right, Cobain sat on the couch and dictated how it should sound, which Vig eventually recorded for the record. Even though Vig admitted to working bar by bar to get the track right, they finally found their solution when someone suggested using software to keep it at a steady tempo.
Looking back on the song, Krist Novoselic talked about how much of a nightmare it was trying to get the sound right, telling Sound City, “It was so hard to play with [Kurt’s] guitar.” Then again, if you were asked to play on a track where the tempo was all over the place and an out-of-tune guitar, you’d probably be wondering what you got yourself into as well.
Everything was locked onto a grid now, but it wasn’t the smoothest transition. Instead of using Pro Tools, where you can just delete what you didn’t want, the program they were using meant that if you didn’t like one of the edits that you made, you would have to delete the entire thing, which would end up taking two hours.
For Novoselic, this was not the kind of thing he had signed up for, explaining, “[It] was just a huge pain in the butt. We were like, ‘This is a gimmicky thing. Good thing we have tape. This’ll never take off.’” That last crack would end up being the famous last words of many producers, as Pro Tools and digital audio workstations lead to every artist using a computer instead of spending millions of dollars using tape-based studios.
Even though everything can be put in perfectly now, ‘Something in the Way’ is the perfect blend of digital and analogue recording. It definitely has that steady rhythm that comes with everything being put on a grid, but no song from any generation has ever had the same human emotion behind it.
