Dave Grohl has spent thirty years building one of the most successful post-grunge careers in rock history — Foo Fighters, multiple Grammy wins, a reputation as the most likable man in rock, a public persona of such consistent warmth and humor that it is easy to forget that he was the drummer in the band whose singer’s death was one of the most traumatic events in 1990s music. He does not hide this. He talks about Kurt Cobain with the openness of a man who has processed grief publicly because the grief is too large to keep private, and because the music they made together is too significant to treat as something that belongs only to him.
But there are songs he leaves the room for. Recordings he cannot sit with. Moments where the music connects to something too specific and too raw for even thirty years of processing to fully domesticate.
1. Something in the Way (1991)
The final track on Nevermind — quiet, sparse, Cobain’s voice barely above a whisper over a cello-inflected arrangement that sounds like someone trying very hard not to make noise. Grohl has said this song hits differently from anything else in the catalog because of its stillness — the drums are almost entirely absent, removing Grohl’s own contribution, and what remains is Cobain alone in a way that the louder tracks do not produce. He has said hearing it feels like eavesdropping on something private.
2. All Apologies (MTV Unplugged, 1993)
The Unplugged performance is the recording Grohl has described most specifically as difficult to return to — not because of any single element but because of the cumulative effect of watching and hearing Cobain in what turned out to be one of his final significant performances, in a state of relative calm and emotional exposure that the electric shows rarely produced. Grohl has said the Unplugged set was extraordinary in the moment and became something different afterward — a document of someone at the edge of something, visible in retrospect in ways that were not visible at the time.
3. Pennyroyal Tea (1993)
A song about isolation, illness, and the specific desire for something to make an unbearable internal state bearable, recorded during the In Utero sessions when Cobain’s personal struggles were severe enough that people close to him were privately alarmed. The song was included on the album, was about to be released as a single, and was pulled from commercial release after Cobain’s death in April 1994. Grohl has said the decision to pull it was correct and that hearing it produces feelings he finds difficult to categorize.
4. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle (1993)
Named after a Seattle actress whose story — institutionalization, forced treatment, the destruction of an extraordinary person by the mechanisms of social control — Cobain identified with explicitly and personally. Grohl has spoken about the degree to which Cobain’s engagement with Farmer’s story reflected his own feelings about his relationship with fame, industry, and the forces that had accumulated around Nirvana in the two years since Nevermind. The song is fierce and distorted and funny in the dark way Cobain’s best writing was funny, and Grohl has said the fierceness now reads as something different than it did in 1993.
5. Where Did You Sleep Last Night (MTV Unplugged, 1993)
The final song of the Unplugged performance — a traditional folk song that Cobain performed with his eyes closed, a vocal of such raw intensity that the studio audience fell completely silent during the performance and the room stayed quiet for several seconds after the final note. Grohl has said this performance is the hardest two minutes in the catalog for him to return to — that Cobain’s delivery connects to something he cannot fully describe and does not entirely want to examine. He has said he was sitting behind the drum kit watching Cobain sing it and understood, in that moment, that something extraordinary was happening. He did not understand, then, what else was happening.
Grohl has said he is grateful the recordings exist. He has also said there are days when gratitude is not the primary feeling. Both things are true and neither cancels the other.