Sounds of Seattle: Creating the perfect fourth Nirvana album
There was no feasible way for Nirvana to continue after Kurt Cobain died. He was the leading voice behind every song they wrote, and even if the rest of the band tried to sprinkle their own material on the final tape, there was zero chance that it would have been received warmly by the grunge masses. If the voice of the age of irony hadn’t fallen silent, though, what would the supposed next album from Nirvana have actually sounded like?
Granted, this can only be speculation from the table scraps we must work with. It was clear that Nirvana was still working on new material up until Cobain passed away, so the demos and miscellaneous songs that they had been road testing would definitely have been fair game had they decided to make another record.
It’s not like the rest of the group hadn’t been busy, either. This could also mean bringing in the beginnings of certain Foo Fighters songs into the mix from Dave Grohl, as well as some cuts that could have put Krist Novoselic’s signature bass touch on top of everything. Whatever it was, there was one thing that was perfectly clear: it wouldn’t sound anything like In Utero.
Because Nirvana looked to switch things up on every single song, and even if this is a small snapshot of what they would have released, it would have been a great way to see what was going on inside Cobain’s head. All signs may have pointed to Nirvana breaking up after they finished the tour, but this could be the final gasp from the group before they took it easy for a while.
Crafting the perfect fourth Nirvana record:
1. ‘Sappy’
Nirvana’s albums always start off with a bang. No one forgets the opening of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ when they first hear it, and the whole reason why ‘Serve The Servants’ works is because of how much it was an antithesis of their pop breakthrough. Although Cobain said throughout his life that he never thought ‘Sappy’ actually sounded right, this could have been the moment where everything finally came together.
With a few tweaks to the production, this could have been a great lead single for the project, especially tying back into Cobain’s central message of women’s rights and teaching men not to become abusers. It may get things off to a pretty caustic start, but Nirvana were never ones for subtlety, and half the reason why this works is that it wakes you up from the word go.
2. ‘Opinion’
Part of the problem with a new Nirvana album is the fact that everyone was on the road at the time of Cobain’s death. No matter how much people may have wanted to hear what he had next, there’s no way to get some time in the studio for that long when there’s another gig coming up in Slovenia two nights later. That might mean digging in the backlog for some stuff, but ‘Opinion’ is one of the most baffling songs in the grunge icons’ songbook that never got fleshed out.
All that we have to go on is a meagre cassette recording from With the Lights Out, but hearing Cobain thrash his way through the song on acoustic guitar is actually a lot better than what people might expect from an odds-and-ends cassette. The melody and his vocal cadence were already there, and all that was left was bringing in the rest of the band. If they only had time to write maybe one more verse, this could have been a way to keep the momentum going for the album.
3. ‘Exhausted’
It was only a matter of time before Dave Grohl started to assert himself in Nirvana. Even if Cobain didn’t like all of his ideas, Grohl might have found an outlet to release his own tunes sooner or later. The number one rule of any great rock band is to not mess with the formula, but ‘Exhausted’ was already in talks to become a Nirvana song before they even got off the road.
As Grohl remembered, Cobain loved the tune and even considered reworking it into a bridge of another song as he did with the guitar line for ‘Scentless Apprentice’. The Foo Fighters’ version definitely has a lot more dissonant noise behind it, but Nirvana getting ahold of it could be the grunge rock equivalent of shoegaze. The group had already been through the rock and roll machine a few times, so this would be the first time they sounded like they were experiencing burnout.
4. ‘Old Age’
The number one genre that was on Cobain’s mind at the time of his death was all about slimming things down. Compared to the loud rock music that he had done for the past half-decade, Cobain thought it might not be a bad idea for him to scale things back and make a few unplugged tunes as well. Though ‘Old Age’ has a foot planted firmly in both camps of Nirvana’s sound, this is the opportunity for them to capitalise on what MTV Unplugged had hinted at.
Rarely do you hear Nirvana playing traditional cowboy-style chords. Yet, this song fits firmly into Cobain’s wheelhouse, singing with a lackadaisical cadence that doesn’t feel all that different from what Screaming Trees had done a few years prior. If anything, adding Grohl’s traditional harmonies on the track could have given the likes of Alice in Chains a run for their money in terms of frail acoustic rock.
5. ‘Alone + Easy Target’
Then again, no one can have too many slow burners on their album. It’s one thing to make a record that sounds perfect from front to back, but if you frontload everything in the first place, it starts to sound like audio NyQuil further down the record. Grohl doesn’t really understand the meaning of the word ‘calm’, though, and ‘Alone + Easy Target’ is another Foo Fighters track that works surprisingly well in a future Nirvana project.
Grohl already had acoustic songs in the can at this point, like ‘Friend of a Friend’, but hearing this version of him after ‘Exhausted’ strikes the perfect balance of what kind of songwriter we were working with. It was still fairly rudimentary compared to what Cobain had been coming up with, but if he could craft a hook like this, just imagine what they could have gotten up to if they had hung on for that much longer.
6. ‘Dogs’
The moment that Cobain died, no one in the group was hit harder than Krist Novoselic. This was the friend that he had known from school all his life, and even if they had drifted apart in the business, seeing him go so quickly was never going to be easy to get over. But moving out of music entirely might have been too painful, and ‘Dogs’ is one of the few tracks that Sweet 75 pumped out that actually manages to sound grungey.
While it fits a little nicer into the kind of old-school rock and roll throwbacks of the late 1990s, ‘Dogs’ has that trademark weirdness that made Novoselic the oddball in the band, down to the fact that half of it is played on acoustic guitar. Since the final version of the tune sounds more or less like a demo than an actual song, bringing it to the rest of the guys may have been just the trick for Novoselic to go from a decent songwriter to a seasoned pro.
7. ‘The Man Who Sold the World’
Nirvana were usually pretty picky when it came to which artists they wanted to cover. They had that one Kiss cover they recorded completely drunk off their ass, but if they gave a nod to someone else, it was normally to prop them up in the scene. David Bowie didn’t need recognition as an unsung rock idol, but since people had become used to their cover of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ live, it might have been time for a full studio version of the tune, perhaps with a little more punch.
There are already a few electronic touches on the Unplugged version, such as Cobain’s fuzz box, but bringing it into the studio may have been a great way to get Pat Smear involved. Smear already had a background of being one of the biggest punk rockers on the West Coast, so hearing him do a remix of the tune with his pummeling guitars might have created the perfect psychedelic haze to the song. The subject matter is already about someone not quite at home, so this kind of production might just emphasise that loneliness.
8. ‘Inquiring Minds’
It would take Novoselic a few more years to actually get behind the microphone. Since the most that anyone had heard of him was the pisstake that he did at the very beginning of ‘Territorial Pissings’, many were wondering what the massive bass player would have sounded like had he given a shit about pitch. As it turns out, on the only Eyes Adrift album, it’s actually a pretty nice folksy voice.
On ‘Inquiring Minds’, he is nowhere near the shriek of Cobain or Grohl, but his subdued take on this cosmic take on rock and roll is a lot more interesting than many realise. Outside of the vague allusions to Jon Benet, the rest of the group could flip the morbid subject matter around a little bit to make everything a bit more cheery. Or if they decided to play it completely straight, the flowers left behind at a funeral could have just signalled the fact that Nirvana may not be around for much longer.
9. ‘Do Re Mi’
Home demos are always a bit tricky when sorting through this kind of album. It’s still a great piece of history for fans, but there’s no way to tell what a song like ‘Do Re Mi’ would have sounded like had Cobain had time to flesh it out. If he had put more into the arrangement and obtained a lot more guitars, this could have been a way of him putting a lot of the post-grunge players in their place.
Since most of the biggest stars in the world were riding Cobain’s coattails all the way to the bank, the melody of this tune is so sweet that he could have gone in the complete opposite direction and given us a hint of the folk-rocker that he always had inside him. Fellow grunge rockers Pearl Jam had already claimed Neil Young as their adopted godfather, but Cobain may have gotten closer to what Young’s mentality was about than anyone else in Seattle.
10. ‘You Know You’re Right’
The last days of Nirvana were bound to be fraught with tension. Cobain was still succumbing to his addiction and was becoming more depressed by the day, so it wasn’t even clear that he would have shown up to the studio for what would become ‘You Know You’re Right’, let alone play the song. But what formed out of a random jam halfway through a gig turned into one of the last golden tracks that fans got to hear.
While it had to wait a few more years before getting released on a greatest hits record, ‘You Know You’re Right’ was the perfect way of showing fans what Nirvana were all about, both present and future. Since the lyrics of the rest of the album had to deal with the pressures of fame and raw exhaustion, this disaffected answer back describes Cobain to a tee. He had always been open about sharing his pain, but the nonchalant title drop on the song on this album could have been a metallicised version of ‘Something in the Way’.
