About a Girl

Infobox Single
Name = About a Girl


Artist = Nirvana
from Album =
MTV Unplugged in New York
B-side = "Something in the Way" (live)
Released = Start date|1994|10|24
Format = CD
Recorded = Start date|1993|11|18
Genre = Grunge
Length = 3:37
Label = DGC
Producer = Nirvana and Scott Litt
Last single = "Pennyroyal Tea"
(1994)
This single = "About a Girl" (live)
(1994)
Next single = "Aneurysm"
(1996)Extra tracklisting
Album = MTV Unplugged in New York
Type = live
prev_track =
prev_no =
this_track = "About a Girl"
track_no = 1
next_track = "Come As You Are"
next_no = 2

"About a Girl" is a song by the American grunge band Nirvana. It is the third song on the group's debut album, "Bleach" (1989). It is also the first song on the posthumous "MTV Unplugged in New York" album from which it was a single in 1994.

History

Dating back to at least 1987, "About A Girl" is often considered to be Kurt Cobain's first great pop song.Fact|date=January 2008 It is also perhaps the closest he ever came to writing a traditional love song, except for "Drain You".Fact|date=January 2008

According to the 1993 Nirvana biography "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana" 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, the producer of "Bleach", 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 of 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. 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.

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." Fact|date=April 2008

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. Fact|date=April 2008

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 "". Fact|date=April 2008

Other versions

A live electric version of "About A Girl," recorded in 1990, appears as a B-side on the band's 1990 "Sliver" non-album single. Cobain later expressed embarassment towards the inclusion of this particular live version by calling it "ragged" in "the most unappealing way". The single for "Sliver" was apart of Nirvana's buyout deal while jumping ship from its indie Sub Pop label to the big-label major David Geffen Company.

Another live electric version, recorded in 1991, appears on the 1994 home video, "Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!". Another live version from Nirvana's show at the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam on November 25, 1991 appears on the re-released version of "Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!" which was re-released on DVD in 2006.

A solo demo version appears on the 2004 Nirvana box set, "With the Lights Out", and on the 2005 compilation album, "". The "“Bleach”" version was re-released in 2002 on the band's "best-of" compilation, "Nirvana".

ingle

"About A Girl" was released as "MTV Unplugged in New York"'s only commercial single and reached number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart in late 1994. Five thousand numbered limited edition copies were sold in Australia, an additional 200 copies were unnumbered for promotional use. A standard single was also sold in countries across Europe. The following songs appear on the single:
#"About A Girl" (Cobain)
#"Something in the Way" (Cobain)

Chart positions

ingles charts

Airplay charts

Accolades

*Ranked #2 in "NME's" "Top 20 Nirvana Songs" (2004)
*Ranked #2 in "Q's" "10 Greatest Nirvana Songs Ever" (2004)
*Ranked #1 in "Q's" "The 100 Greatest Singers and their 1000 Greatest Songs" (2007) in which Kurt was ranked as the 7th greatest singer

Covers

"About A Girl" has been covered by Japanese trip-hop band, Cibo Matto.

According to the official Foo Fighters web site, Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl covered "About A Girl" during a studio session with music producer Barrett JonesFact|date=October 2007. It has yet to be released.

Puddle of Mudd also has covered "About A Girl"

References

* [http://www.sliver.it/nirvana/test/pages/official/about_unplugged.html About A Girl discography infomation at sliver.it]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-zRt2OmKm0 About A Girl live unplugged]
*Azerrad, Michael. "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana", Doubleday, New York: 1993, ISBN 0-86369-746-1

External links