All In All Is All We Are

Nirvana “All Apologies”

The guitar line that runs through “All Apologies” sounds like a mid-‘60s Beatles melody stretched out and twisted into a Moebius strip, as though Kurt Cobain had found a way to take the essence of ephemerality and joy in rock music and make it seem eternal and holy. The core of the song, extending out into Cobain’s lyrics, is in this tension between the joy of living in the moment and the vastness of all the time around that moment. It’s like he’s taking this thing he obviously cared deeply about – the inspiration and thrill of the moment, of living and feeling as authentically as possible – and making it into a religion. And in this faith, Rubber Soul is a book of psalms. In this creed, “All Apologies” is as much an expression of guilt and shame as it as a hymn to the power of the rock music can make life feel urgent and exciting and real.

It’s hard to get over how much “All Apologies” sounds like a suicide note set to music, even with the knowledge that Cobain wrote the basic structural elements of the song and its lyrics before Nevermind even came out. A lot of the ideas that Cobain put into his actual suicide note are there in the lyrics, but so was a reference to the famous Neil Young lyric “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.” “All Apologies” sounds like it’s trying to do both – the chorus hinges on the fantasy of being incinerated in the sun, the ending evoking the gradual erosion of time with everything eventually turning to dust.

Cobain had described this song – which is mostly him singing about gnawing guilt and self-loathing and an inability to experience joy like other people – as “peaceful, happy, comfort.” I suppose when he said that, he was mainly thinking of the Lennon/McCartney sunshine in that guitar melody even if he played it as overcast, and in the notion of embracing total oblivion. Or maybe he was thinking of that last “married, buried, YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH,” a moment of dumb rock fun in a song that’s otherwise heavy and solemn.

For many years I never thought too much about the “married” part of this song, but there’s a passage in Rob Sheffield’s first memoir Love Is A Mix Tape that changed my perspective on it. The book, which is mostly about Rob’s marriage to the late writer Renée Crist, takes place in the ‘90s and there’s a bit midway through the book in which Rob remembers listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York shortly after Cobain’s death. The album really messed him up at the time, and not for the obvious reasons. Rob and Kurt were around the same age and married around the same time, and this point of identification made Rob zero in on this aspect of his life. He heard it all as love songs, especially “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies.”

A little excerpt:

“He sings, all through Unplugged, about the kind of love you can’t leave until you die. The more he sang about this, the more his voice upset me. He made me think about death and marriage and a lot of things that I didn’t want to think about at all. I would have been glad to push this music to the back of my brain, put some furniture in front of it so I couldn’t see it, and wait thirty or forty years for it to rot so it wouldn’t be there to scare me anymore. The married guy was a lot more disturbing to me than the dead junkie.”

That’s the guilt in the song. It’s the fear of not being enough for your wife and child, of feeling in over your head and not up to the challenge of being what you know is owed to them. Like a lot of Nirvana songs, “All Apologies” is about grappling with the expectations of masculinity, but unlike a lot of Nirvana songs it’s not coming to the conclusion that these gender roles are all bullshit. In this one he’s confronting his shortcomings and inability to “be a man” and deciding he’s not enough and never will be enough. He’s sorry about it, but finding a sort of peace with it. It’s the mentality of someone who’s convinced that he’s a failure and people are better off without him.

Because this song is coming from such a specifically masculine perspective I think it’s a hard song for women to cover, though several have tried. The version sung by Lorde, backed up by the surviving members of the band, Kim Gordon, and Annie Clark, is interesting but when I hear her sing it I don’t sense much connection to the material. It’s more like she’s just engaging with the abstract concept of Cobain, the Pure Authentic Rock Star. The version by Sinead O’Connor, released the same year he died, is better. Her vocal is strong and her connection to the themes comes across, but the arrangement omits the central guitar melody and that’s just too essential to the song for any version to work without it. If you’re not playing that part, you’re just not doing the song.

I’m more fond of Herbie Hancock’s instrumental take on it, which really digs into the possibilities of Cobain’s guitar and vocal melodies while voicing it all with more soulful inflections. It engages with the musical tension of the song, that pull between right now and forever. Hancock’s version is like a What If? comic, imagining what the song would’ve been if it came out of a totally different artistic lineage – jazz, R&B – but was reckoning with all the same ideas and feelings.

There are several recordings of “All Apologies” by Nirvana besides the original studio version on In Utero and the famous acoustic version from MTV Unplugged. Demos at various stages of completion, a early live version with unfinished lyrics, a handful of different mixes for the In Utero version. One of the most striking things about even the earliest versions is how the differences between them and the final recording are relatively minor – the structure doesn’t change much and though he revised the lyrics a few times the sentiment is always the same. The greatest variation is in tone, and I imagine one’s taste in “All Apologies” versions largely comes down to what aspect of the song is most resonant. If I had to choose, I probably like the proper In Utero version mixed by Scott Litt the most, but I do love the deep, funereal cello moan and soft landing of the Unplugged recording. I like the way the “2013” mix adds some scuff marks and texture to what Litt arrived at in the booth. Even the one demo version on the deluxe In Utero with the often barely audible scratch vocal and the overbearingly jangly Lemonheads-ish second guitar part is worthwhile, if just because there’s something perversely wonderful in hearing Cobain force the song into a happier, more carefree shape.

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