Nirvana
Nirvana’s ‘Something in the Way’ Soundtracks Dystopian ‘The Batman’ Trailer
“Punk rock” is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Batman, but Matt Reeves’ reimagining of the Dark Knight shows a grittier side to the beloved superhero. Warner Bros. hosted a panel at DC Fandome Saturday night to give fans a look into The Batman, including its first trailer, and they picked the perfect song to soundtrack the clip: Nirvana’s “Something in the Way.” The iconic Nevermind closer weaves its way throughout the trailer, intertwining with Michael Giacchino’s movie score and dialogue from the film while highlighting the dystopian feel of Reeves’ Gotham City. As Stereogum points out, Nirvana syncs are not all that common nor easy to come by. When “Something in the Way” was licensed for Jake Gyllenhaal’s 2005 war movi...
Dave Chappelle Hosted a Socially Distant 4th of July Music Festival
After his 8:46 stand-up special showed that live events can work safely during the pandemic, Dave Chappelle gave his fans another night to remember over the holiday weekend. The comedy icon hosted a July 4th music festival in Yellow Springs, Ohio, featuring some of the biggest names in both hip-hop and comedy. This isn’t Chappelle’s first music fest — as his famous “Block Party” featuring Kanye West and Mos Def took place 16 years ago and he’s hosted other events in Yellow Springs — but its certainly his first music event featuring a socially distant crowd. Saturday’s six-hour event was presented to a 400-person audience, with every attendee tested for COVID prior to the show. The show featured performances from Erykah Badu, Common, and Talib Kweli, with stand-up from M...
James Blake Turns Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ into a Soulful Piano Ballad: Watch
James Blake has been treating fans to livestream performances since quarantine began, covering everything from Radiohead to Stevie Wonder. On Saturday, the singer-songwriter hosted a “piano improv concert” via Instagram while encouraging viewers to donate to Rachel Cargle’s Loveland Foundation, “who provide opportunity, access, and therapy for Black women and girls.” During the set, Blake turned Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” into a soulful piano ballad, as requested by a fan, and honestly we’re surprised with how well it works. Watch the cover below. Blake isn’t the only musician to cover Nirvana during lockdown. Last month, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo covered “Heart-Shaped Box,” and in April Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard put his spin on “All Apologies,” while Post Malone and Blink-1...
James Blake Turns Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ into a Soulful Piano Ballad: Watch
James Blake has been treating fans to livestream performances since quarantine began, covering everything from Radiohead to Stevie Wonder. On Saturday, the singer-songwriter hosted a “piano improv concert” via Instagram while encouraging viewers to donate to Rachel Cargle’s Loveland Foundation, “who provide opportunity, access, and therapy for Black women and girls.” During the set, Blake turned Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” into a soulful piano ballad, as requested by a fan, and honestly we’re surprised with how well it works. Watch the cover below. Blake isn’t the only musician to cover Nirvana during lockdown. Last month, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo covered “Heart-Shaped Box,” and in April Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard put his spin on “All Apologies,” while Post Malone and Blink-1...
Kurt Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Guitar Sells for Over $6 Million
Due to the pandemic, it was a smaller than usual group at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, but excitement still crackled through the air as spectators and bidders, held their breath, bit their lips and sat on the edges of their seats as Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s famed 1959 Martin D-18E acoustic guitar (and its vintage hardshell case affixed with baggage claim tags and stickers), the featured highlight of the two-day auction and prominently displayed on stage all afternoon, sold for an incredible $6.01 million to Peter Freedman from Rode Microphones who was in attendance. The $6.01 million is a new world record for a guitar at an auction. The previous record-holder was a Stratocaster owned by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour that fetched $3.95 million. CREDIT: Pamela Chelin “My parents we...
SPIN’s First Nirvana Cover Shoot Photos Up for Auction
Nirvana’s first-ever nationwide magazine cover was with SPIN in January 1992. It became a piece of rock history and one that you can now own yourself. Greg Watermann, who took the photo for us, is putting his famous negatives from the photo session up for auction this weekend at Julien’s in Beverly Hills. If you remember, this is the same auction where Kurt Cobain’s 1959 Martin D-18E acoustic-electric guitar, which he used on MTV Unplugged, will be auctioned as well. It’s valued at…$1 million. But back to the negatives. The package includes everything from Watermann’s archive: 100 original color slides and black-and-white negatives — every photo published plus the outtakes, the original contact sheets, signed analog gallery prints, the Hasselblad camera used for the sho...
Travis Barker on Having His Own Label and Covering Nirvana With Post Malone
Almost everyone saw (or at least heard about) the livestream where Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker teamed up with Post Malone to pay homage to Nirvana in a rousing 75-minute set that, by some estimates, raised nearly $3 million for coronavirus related charities. Barker has, in his own words, been thriving during quarantine. “As far as quarantine I can just focus and create. I’ve been very productive and just been on one,” he told SPIN last week when we spoke to him by phone as he traveled from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City on his bus for a week-long songwriting session with Malone The drummer has new Blink-182 music coming in the next two weeks; he has been busy at work producing the new Machine Gun Kelly album, Tickets To My Downfall; he signed jxdn, the first artist to his new DTA imprin...
10 Travel Questions With Krist Novoselic
In the early 1990s Nirvana, an unglamorous band out of Aberdeen, Washington, near Seattle, comprising singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain, Bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, changed rock ‘n roll more profoundly than any other group since the Beatles. They’d been on the Northwest scene for a few years, releasing a largely unnoticed record on a local label, Sub Pop, and were bubbling up as the Next Big Thing, until the release of a single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from their second record in 1991, made them very much the Next Big Thing. Until 1994 when Kurt Cobain died by suicide, they were not only the most popular band on the planet, they were the most dynamic musical force. They were original and glorious. After the band dissolved in ‘94, Grohl started the Foo Fighters and Kris...
Peel Sessions From Nirvana, David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees Organized Online
Disc jockey John Peel was a music institution for almost four decades, highlighting influential bands and underground sounds on his BBC Radio 1 program. The shows featured over 4,000 in-studio sessions from over 2,000 artists — captured from 1967 up through his death in 2004. A good chunk of those recordings are floating around YouTube, but it’s exhausting trying to wade through them all. Now, thanks to blogger David Strickland, that process just got a whole lot easier. Over at his “Formally Known as the Bollocks” blog, Strickland is rounding up an exhaustive, alphabetized list of the Peel sessions available online — at least 1,000 so far. Highlights include two Nirvana performances (1990 and 1991), David Bowie’s 1972 recording with the Spiders from Mars, five sets from Siouxsie and the Ba...
Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo Covers Nirvana’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ on Piano
Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo is a self-proclaimed Nirvana super-fan, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that he covered one of that band’s signature tracks, “Heart-Shaped Box,” during quarantine. The performance, which originated from a Zoom session hosted for fans, finds the songwriter stripping back the heavy In Utero rocker to a quiet solo piano ballad. Decked out in a tank top and seated next to a massive plant, he plucks out the chords and nails the track’s verse-to-chorus dynamic shift — even replicating the guitar solo melody. Cuomo has gushed about his Nirvana obsession in the past, telling Rolling Stone in 2014, “In some ways, I feel like I was Nirvana’s biggest fan in the Nineties. I’m sure there are a zillion people who would make that claim, but I was just so passionately in lo...
