What was About a Girl inspired by?

Songfacts®:

• Kurt Cobain wrote this for his girlfriend at the time, Tracy Marander. They lived together for a while, and she took the photo that's on the album cover. Marander didn't know the song was about her until she read about it years later in the book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana.

• According to Chad Channing, who was Nirvana's drummer at the time, Cobain didn't have a title for this song when he brought it to the studio. Chad told Songfacts: "I remember we were rehearsing the song not long before we went in and recorded the record, Bleach. Kurt was just playing the song and we were working it out. I asked Kurt what the song was, and Kurt was like, 'Well, I don't really know.' And then I said, 'Well, what's it about?' And he says, 'It's about a girl.' And I said, 'Well, why don't you just call it 'About A Girl'?' And he just kind of looked at me and smiled and said, 'Okay.' We went with that."

  Channing adds that this is one of the songs that really impressed him about Cobain's songwriting. "It's kind of heavy, but it's got a total pop sensibility," he said. "I always thought he was a great songwriter."

• This was one of Nirvana's first songs. It was released on Sub Pop, an independent record label they recorded on before being signed by David Geffen's DGC Records.

• Kurt Cobain wrote this after spending the previous night listening to The Beatles first US album, Meet The Beatles, over and over.

• This is the first track on Nirvana's acoustic album MTV Unplugged In New York, which was released after the death of Cobain. Thanks to airplay, the song hit #22 in the US in October 1994, which was about six months after Cobain died.

• The album Bleach initially sold about 35,000 copies, which was pretty good for an Indie band and got them signed to a major label. The album eventually sold over 1 million copies, as many Nirvana fans bought it after Cobain died.

• This was popular on college radio long before Nirvana hit it big.

• The album cost about $600 to produce. They got the title from a public service campaign in San Francisco that urged intravenous drug users to "Bleach Your Works," meaning to clean their needles with bleach so they would not spread the AIDS virus. At one point, Cobain wanted to call the album "Too Many Humans."

• The cover of Bleach shows four band members. For a while, Nirvana had a second guitarist named Jason Everman.

• On Nirvana's MTV Unplugged special, Cobain said, "This is off our first record, most people don't own it" before playing the song. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Elliot - St. Louis, MO

• Cobain was afraid that the punk/grunge crowd would accuse him of selling out with Nevermind. In order to deflect that possibility, he frequently reminded people that he'd been writing songs with pop melodies ever since "About a Girl" and "Sliver."

  Cobain explained his apprehension in a 1993 interview: "I was heavily into pop, I really liked R.E.M., and I was into all kinds of old '60s stuff. But there was a lot of pressure within that social scene, the underground - like the kind of thing you get in high school. And to put a jangly R.E.M.-type-of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky."

• Marander snapped the famous photo when the band was playing at Reko/Muse Gallery in Olympia, Washington, on April 1, 1989. When it came time to do the cover layout at the Seattle music zine The Rocket, graphic designer/musician Lisa Orth inverted the image to look like a film negative. For the tall block lettering that would soon become Nirvana's iconic logo, Orth simply told typesetter Grant Alden to use whatever he already had installed on the machine, which happened to be the Onyx font.

  Art Chantry, Orth's fellow graphic designer at the magazine, who also designed album covers for bands like Mudhoney and Soundgarden, explained in the Nirvana book Taking Punk to the Masses: "It was a typeface called Onyx which is a Compugraphic bad design of Bodoni Condensed - really hunky, ugly, and those Compugraphics, if you didn't use the right kerning programs you had really bad letterspacing. And so Grant Alden basically just sat down, slammed it out, charged Lisa Orth 15 bucks, which she paid out of pocket, and that is where Nirvana's logo came from."

• Puddle of Mudd performed an acoustic rendition of "About a Girl" for a session at SiriusXM. Uploaded to YouTube in January 2020, it went viral three months later, with detractors blasting singer Wes Scantlin's off-key vocals.

About a Girl is the third song on the album Bleach.

Info[]

Dating back to at least 1988, "About a Girl" is often considered to be Kurt Cobain's first great pop song. It is also perhaps the closest he ever came to writing a traditional love song.

According to the 1993 Nirvana biography Come As You Are by Michael Azerrad, "About a Girl" was written after Cobain spent an entire afternoon listening to Meet the Beatles! repeatedly. At the time, Cobain was trying to conceal his pop songwriting instincts, and he was reluctant to include the song on Bleach for fear of alienating the band's then-exclusively grunge fanbase. "To put a jangly, R.E.M. type of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky," he admitted in a 1993 Rolling Stone interview.

However, Bleach's producer Jack Endino was excited about the song, and even saw it as a potential single. Years later, Butch Vig, who produced Nirvana's 1991 breakthrough album Nevermind, would cite "About a Girl" as the first hint that there was more to Nirvana than grunge. "Everyone talks about Kurt's love affair with...the whole punk scene, but he was also a huge Beatles fan, and the more time we spent together the more obvious their influence on his songwriting became," Vig told the NME in 2004.

"About a Girl" was recorded for Bleach in December 1988 by Endino in Seattle, Washington. It remained one of the few songs from Bleach which Cobain continued to perform live until his death on April 1994. The acoustic MTV Unplugged rendition, recorded in 1993 and released posthumously on MTV Unplugged in New York in 1994, is perhaps the most familiar reading of the song. The Unplugged version of the song is featured in the Music Video Game Guitar Hero: World Tour.

Recording Session(s)[]

• 1987/1988 - Cobain Residence, Olympia, WA
• December 24, 29, 30 & 31, 1988 - Reciprocal Recording, Seattle, WA
• October 26, 1989 - BBC Maida Vale Studios, London, UK (John Peel Show)
• November 1, 1989 - Villa 65, Hilversum, NL (Nozems-a-Gogo)
• November 18, 1993 - Sony Music Studios, New York, NY (MTV Unplugged)

Meaning[]

According to Chad Channing, Nirvana's drummer around the time of Bleach, Cobain didn't have a title for the song when he first brought it into the studio. When asked what it was about, Cobain replied, "It's about a girl."

The girl in question was Tracy Marander, Cobain's then-girlfriend, with whom he lived at the time. Apparently, Marander had asked Cobain why he had never written a song for her, and Cobain responded with "About a Girl." The song addresses the couple's fractured relationship, caused by Cobain's refusal to get a job, or to share cleaning duties at their apartment (which housed many of his pets). During arguments on the subject, Cobain would occasionally threaten to move into his car, at which point Marander would usually relent.

Strangely, Cobain never told Marander that he had written "About a Girl" for her. In the 1998 Nick Broomfield documentary Kurt and Courtney, Marander revealed that she only found out after reading Come As You Are.

Single[]

"About a Girl" was released as the only commercial single from MTV Unplugged in New York. Five thousand numbered limited edition copies were sold in Australia, while a standard single was sold in countries across Europe.

The songs that appeared on the single were About a Girl and "Something in the Way".

Lyrics[]

I need an easy friend
I do, with an ear to lend
I do think you fit this shoe
I do, but you have a clue

I'll take advantage while
You hang me out to dry
But I can't see you every night
Free (I do, I do)

I'm standing in your line
I do hope you have the time
I do pick a number too
I do keep a date with you

I'll take advantage while
You hang me out to dry
But I can't see you every night
Free

I need an easy friend
I do, with an ear to lend
I do think you fit this shoe
I do, but you have a clue

I'll take advantage while
You hang me out to dry
But I can't see you every night
No, I can't see you every night
Free

I do
I do
I do
I do

External Links[]

Was Nirvana influenced by the Beatles?

Who is Tracy Marander?

When did About a Girl come out?