The only Nirvana songs written by the entire band
How do you describe grunge music? It’s a difficult one, given that it has influences from a number of different strands of rock, but it isn’t those strands that make it stand out as a movement. When we listen to bands like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana, the kings of the movement, what stands out most predominantly is the beautiful contradiction they all embodied.
Grunge is a style of music that can flip from one emotion to the other incredibly quickly. There is a clear difference that can be heard between anger and sorrow, rage and melancholy, which seems to be prevalent throughout the movement as a whole. Nirvana are one of the best examples of this.
Simply take their acoustic rendition of the track ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ and you can understand the appeal of the movement. The song starts solemn, with simple sadness and constant questioning throughout, gently evolving into a song that evokes outrage and anger. Cobain’s voice contributes to this in a huge way, as he was one of the pioneering voices in Nirvana.
Kurt Cobain was the frontman and main songwriter of the band. He was capable of embodying the emotion with which he wrote and was unafraid to touch upon various themes, no matter how difficult they might be. This often came at the cost of upsetting some people, but Cobain was always clear in his message when he wrote songs.
A good example is the track ‘Rape Me’. With such a direct and controversial name, it’s no surprise that a lot of people heard this track and immediately turned their noses up at it, but Cobain’s message was a direct stance against sexual assault. “It’s like she’s saying, ‘Rape me, go ahead, rape me, beat me. You’ll never kill me. I’ll survive this, and I’m gonna fucking rape you one of these days, and you won’t even know it,” he said.
While Cobain wrote the majority of Nirvana’s songs, the band wrote some tracks together. They were all multi-instrumentalists, perfectly personified in Dave Grohl’s success with his next band, Foo Fighters, and as such, everyone contributed to the overall sound of Nirvana.
It should come as no surprise that this happened on the album In Utero, given that the record was written over the course of a few weeks. The intention was that the album have almost a live feel to it. Each member would sit around and work on different measures until something stuck. The song from the album credited to all three of them was ‘Scentless Apprentice’, a track Cobain described as “cliché grunge” but also admitted he liked the feel.
There were some tracks off their other albums which were also team efforts, the most famous of which was the bands massive hit ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. The story goes that Cobain loved the riff but couldn’t work out how it should be properly packed. After playing around with different tempos and styles for hours, Grohl was finally able to add drums that worked, and the track came to fruition shortly after.
Though Nirvana is commonly thought of as a band produced by Kurt Cobain, each member was responsible for contributing to the sound that made them famous. There are a few tracks that every one of them put their spin on.
Nirvana songs written by the entire band:
- ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’
- ‘Scentless Apprentice’
- ‘Aneurysm’
- ‘Endless, Nameless’
- ‘Curmudgeon’
