‘Scentless Apprentice’: The Nirvana song inspired by a 19th-century German author
You’d be surprised how many books have inspired great songs. Nirvana, Kate Bush, and Joni Mitchell have all written songs based on their favourite novel.
It shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Artists are inspired most by the things that they surround themselves with, which include different destinations, people, and other pieces of art. A lot of the time, you hear this more in the music someone makes as opposed to the lyrics they write. For instance, a fan of rock music will likely go on to make rock music, but lyrics can be impacted by outside influence as well.
Bruce Springsteen has openly admitted that when he first started making music, whenever he wrote lyrics, he did so with the work of Bob Dylan in mind. He wanted to make people feel the same way that Bob Dylan made him feel, and so when Springsteen was originally signed, the record label did so with the intention of him becoming the next folk rock icon.
“I want people to get the same experience from listening to one of my records as I had when I listened to Highway 61 Revisited,” he said. “The idea that something was revealed to them that was fundamentally true and essential, and gave you a view of your world, your country, your town, your neighbours, your family.”
Given that a lot of lyricists are often looking for inspiration, you’ll struggle to find one who isn’t constantly reading and trying to discover new ideas. While a lot of onlookers heard grunge and figured the music was senseless aggression, Kurt Cobain was always looking for lyrical inspiration from different places, which included between the pages of a book.
Don’t get me wrong, Cobain was also capable of writing nonsense lyrics, as their most popular track, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, contains plenty of lyrics that even members of the band admitted don’t make any sense. “Just seeing Kurt write the lyrics to a song five minutes before he first sings them, you just kind of find it a little bit hard to believe that the song has a lot to say about something,” said Dave Grohl when discussing the track, “You need syllables to fill up this space, or you need something that rhymes.”
However, while Cobain might have penned that grunge classic in a matter of moments, there are plenty of other songs which he took his time to consider. One of these is ‘Scentless Apprentice’, a track which has a direct link to Cobain’s influences, as he dragged the lyrics out of the pages of a book that he was reading at the time.
The lyrics were inspired by the novel ‘Perfume’, which was written by German author Patrick Suskind. The story follows an individual who was born without any kind of sense of smell, who eventually goes down a dark path which leads to murder. The themes of isolation and pressure discussed within the novel likely resonated with Cobain on a deep level. Dave Grohl certainly agreed, as while he might have criticised the words in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, he felt that Cobain’s lyrics in ‘Scentless Apprentice’ were some of his most powerful.
“One of my favorite lines in a Nirvana song – which is f–king dark and which I didn’t realize the weight of until I sat in my house in Seattle playing the first mixes of In Utero is the line on ‘Scentless Apprentice’ where Kurt sings, ‘You can’t fire me because I quit’,” said Grohl, “If there’s one line in any song that gives me the chills it’s that one. Maybe all those things that people wrote about him painted him into a corner that he couldn’t get out of.”
