History
According to the 1994 Nirvana biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael Azerrad, "About a Girl" was written after Kurt 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 fan base. In a 1993 Rolling Stone interview with David Fricke, he explained:
"Even to put "About a Girl" on Bleach was a risk. 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."
However, Bleach 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 Nirvana continued to perform live until Cobain's death in April 1994. A live acoustic rendition was recorded during the band's MTV Unplugged set on November 18, 1993 at Sony Music Studios in New York City. It was released on the band's posthumous MTV Unplugged in New York album in 1994, and as the only commercial single from that album, peaking at number one on the Modern Rock Tracks chart.
The “Bleach” version was re-released on the band's 2002 "best-of" compilation album, Nirvana. The Unplugged version was re-released on the band's second greatest hits album, Icon, in 2010, and the video of the performance appears on the 2007 MTV Unplugged in New York DVD. The Unplugged version also appears as a playable song in the video game Guitar Hero World Tour, and the studio version appears as downloadable content for the Rock Band video game.
Read more about this topic: About A Girl (Nirvana Song)
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