About a Girl
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| “About A Girl (live)” | ||||||||||||||
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| Single by Nirvana from the album MTV Unplugged in New York |
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| B-side | "Something In The Way" (live) | |||||||||||||
| Released | October 24, 1994 | |||||||||||||
| Format | CD | |||||||||||||
| Recorded | November 18, 1993 | |||||||||||||
| Genre | Grunge | |||||||||||||
| Length | 3:37 | |||||||||||||
| Label | DGC | |||||||||||||
| Producer | Nirvana and Scott Litt | |||||||||||||
| Nirvana singles chronology | ||||||||||||||
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"About a Girl" is a song by the American grunge band, Nirvana. It is the third song on their 1989 debut album, Bleach. It is also the first song on the posthumous MTV Unplugged in New York album from which it was a single in 1994.
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[edit] History
Dating back to at least 1987, "About A Girl" is often considered to be Kurt Cobain's first great pop song.[citation needed] It is also perhaps the closest he ever came to writing a traditional love song, except for "Drain You".[citation needed]
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 1988 by Endino in Seattle, Washington. It remained one of the few songs from Bleach which Cobain continued to perform live until his 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.
[edit] 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."[citation needed]
The girl in question was Tracy Marander, Cobain's then-girlfriend, with whom he lived with 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.[citation needed]
Strangely, 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 Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana.[citation needed]
[edit] Other versions
A live, electric version of "About A Girl," recorded in 1990, appears as a B-side on CD versions of the band's 1990 single for the song "Sliver".
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, Sliver: The Best of the Box. The “Bleach” version was re-released in 2002 on the band's "best-of" compilation, Nirvana.
[edit] Single
"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)
[edit] Chart positions
[edit] Singles charts
| Year | Single | Chart | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | About A Girl | Official Australian Singles Chart[1] | No. 4 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Official Finland Singles Chart[2] | No. 8 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Official Belgium Singles Chart[3] | No. 13 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Official Sweden Singles Chart[4] | No. 20 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Official Italian Singles Chart | No. 20 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Official Holland Singles Chart | No. 22 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Official French Singles Chart[5] | No. 23 |
[edit] Airplay charts
| Year | Single | Chart | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | About A Girl | Hot Modern Rock Tracks (US)[6] | No. 1 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks (US)[7] | No. 3 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Finland Mitä hittiä Chart[2] | No. 7 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Triple J Hottest 100 (Australia) | No. 7 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Latvian Airplay Top[8] | No. 4 |
| 1992 | About A Girl | Polish Airplay Chart[9] | No. 3 |
| 1993 | About A Girl | French Airplay Chart[10] | No. 9 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Canadian National Airplay Chart[11] | No. 9 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Top 40 Mainstream (US)[12] | No. 29 |
| 1994 | About A Girl | Billboard Hot 100 Airplay (U.S.) | No. 22 |
[edit] 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
[edit] 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 Jones[citation needed]. It has yet to be released.
Puddle of Mudd also has covered "About A Girl"
[edit] References
- ^ Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970-1992. St Ives, N.S.W. ISBN 0646119176.
- ^ a b Pennanen, Timo (2003). Sisältää hitin: levyt ja esittäjät Suomen musiikkilistoilla vuodesta 1972. Otava Publishing Company Ltd. ISBN 951121053X.
- ^ Het Belgisch Hit Boek - 45 jaar hits in Vlaanderen 1954-1999. By Robert Collin
- ^ swedishcharts.com - Swedish Charts Portal
- ^ lescharts.com - Les charts français
- ^ Billboard.com - Artist Chart History - Nirvana
- ^ Billboard.com - Artist Chart History - Nirvana
- ^ Charts All Over the World
- ^ Polskie Radio Online
- ^ http://www.infodisc.fr/ French Airplay Chart
- ^ Top 40 Hits, The Essential Chart Guide, 1975 - 1999. By Nanda Lwin. ISBN1-896594-13-1
- ^ Billboard.com - Artist Chart History - Nirvana
- About A Girl discography infomation at sliver.it
- About A Girl live unplugged
- Azerrad, Michael. Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Doubleday, New York: 1993, ISBN 0-86369-746-1
[edit] External links
| Preceded by "Zombie" by The Cranberries |
Billboard Modern Rock Tracks number-one single December 10, 1994 |
Succeeded by "Bang and Blame" by R.E.M. |
