Composition and Lyrics
The song begins with Cobain playing an unaccompanied guitar riff for eight seconds. Cobain used an Electro-Harmonix Small Clone guitar chorus pedal to give his instrument a "watery" tone during the verses and pre-choruses. He is joined by the rest of the band for the first verse, which is moody and subdued. Once the band reaches the chorus, the song reaches full volume. The shift in dynamics is a technique Nirvana used on many of its songs. The song features one of Cobain's longest guitar solos. "Kurt really did not play a lot of solos," Vig said. "This one is more of a melodic part based on the vocal melody. It's not trying to show off pyrotechnics. It complements the melody of the song."
Cobain described the lyrics of "Come as You Are" as contradictory, and said the song was about "people and what they're expected to act like". Pointing to the line "Take your time, hurry up, choice is yours, don't be late", essayist Catherine J. Creswell writes that in Cobain's lyrics, "hrases clump into strings of empty clichés whose own ostensible meaning is forced into contradictions or simple rhyme sound". In light of Cobain's suicide by self-inflicted gunshot-wound in 1994, Allmusic's Mark Deming suggests that "earing Kurt Cobain sing 'And I swear that I don't have a gun' gives 'Come as You Are' a sting it was never meant to have when was first released in 1991." Deming reasons that the "don't have a gun" lyric is " attempt to reassure listeners that . . . his target is the world at large rather than the individuals in it, and that there was still room in this damaged world for everyone".
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