Nirvana‘s “Something in the Way” closes “Nevermind” (not counting the hidden track), and for most of the album’s first three decades, it was the track people skipped on the way back to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It is now one of the band’s most-streamed recordings, which is a peculiar outcome for a song Kurt Cobain sang lying on a studio couch because nobody could figure out how to record it any other way.
The Bridge That Cobain Probably Never Slept Under
As for the bridge mentioned in the lyrics, Cobain pointed people toward the Young Street Bridge in Aberdeen, Washington, a short walk from where he grew up, and said he had lived there as a teenager after his mother put him out of the house.
The people closest to him never backed that up. Krist Novoselic told biographer Charles R. Cross that Cobain hung around the bridge but could not have lived on the banks, since the Wishkah is tidal and the mud floods twice a day. Cobain’s sister Kimberly described it as a spot where neighborhood kids went to smoke and nothing beyond that. Cross’s reporting for Heavier Than Heaven, excerpted in The Seattle Times, confirms the underlying instability. Cobain was failing out of high school, broke, and hauling his belongings around in four garbage bags. The bridge itself crosses files under Cobain’s own myth-making.
Still, fans have layered graffiti across the underside of the span for three decades. A neighbor, Tori Kovach, built the memorial park on the adjacent lot in 2011; the city of Aberdeen took it over in 2015 as Kurt Cobain Memorial Park. The bridge itself is failing. Public works director Rick Sangder told the city council that the 1956 structure carried a sufficiency rating of 31 in 2018, falling to 7 in 2019 before recovering slightly to 14.7 in 2020, on a scale where anything under 40 puts a bridge on the replacement list. Aberdeen has spent several years working through designs against a $23.1 million federal grant, with sustained public pressure to preserve the graffiti-covered southern portion.
Recording “Something in the Way”: A $29 Stella and A Control-room Couch
Butch Vig told NME that “Something in the Way” was by far the hardest thing to track during the “Nevermind” sessions. The band tried cutting it live in Sound City’s main room and got nowhere. The drums were simply too big and too loud for a song Cobain was barely whispering.
Out of frustration, Cobain carried the song into the control room and started playing it on the couch. Vig stopped him there, cleared the room, shut off the air conditioning, unplugged the phone, and put one mic on the guitar and another on the vocal.
The instrument was a secondhand Harmony Stella 12-string, bought from Edgewater Pawn Shop for $29 plus tax on October 12, 1989, and strung with five nylon strings that Cobain said he never bothered replacing. It does not hold pitch, and that became everyone else’s problem. Novoselic had to tune a bass to it. Dave Grohl had to overdub drums against an acoustic track with elastic time while playing far quieter than his instinct. Vig said it took five or six passes before one had the dynamic he wanted.
Cello came last. Kirk Canning, husband of L7 drummer Dee Plakas and a friend of the band through her, cut his part on the final day of the sessions. The idea was Vig’s: he was after the low, ominous string quality of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.” As Vig told Kerrang!, Canning’s struggle to tune against Cobain’s guitar is a large part of why the finished recording sounds so unsettled.
F5 to D♭5: what the score of “Something in the Way” actually does
The official Hal Leonard piano-vocal-guitar edition on MuseScore marks the tempo at quarter note equals 80, “moderately slow,” in 4/4 with four flats, running 40 measures.
The harmony is two chords: F5 and D♭5, one per bar, trading off for essentially the entire song. Both are power chords, root and fifth, no third anywhere in the voicing. In F minor that reads as i moving to VI, a root drop of a major third. Read the same two shapes in A♭ major, and you get vi to IV. The guitar never settles the question. The vocal does, sitting inside F minor and refusing to leave.
The verse phrases move by step within a narrow band and lean hard on repeated pitches, and the refrain never lifts out of the verse the way a chorus is supposed to. “Something in the way” falls instead of climbing, over the same alternation, and by the back half of the chart, the wordless “Mm” passages occupy more space than the lyric does.
The voice does not enter until the fourth bar, so the rocking eighth-note figure establishes itself alone before any words arrive. And in the final system, the meter widens to 5/4 for one measure before the coda, an extra beat that reads more like a performance artifact than a compositional decision. Hal Leonard’s editors were right to leave it in. Pianists get the guitar’s pulse in the left hand with chord frames above the staff, so the chart plays both ways without modification.
How The Batman Sent “Something in the Way” Back Up The Charts
Matt Reeves used the song twice in The Batman and had already placed it in the film’s first trailer back in 2020, having built his version of Bruce Wayne partly around Cobain. The commercial result was immediate. Billboard tallied 3.1 million on-demand U.S. streams in the film’s first four days in March 2022, against 372,000 across the four days prior, a 734 percent jump.
It debuted at No. 5 on Hot Alternative Songs and No. 6 on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs, while “Nevermind” returned to No. 1 on both Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums. Two weeks later, the track entered the Hot 100 at No. 46, Nirvana’s first appearance on that chart since “You Know You’re Right” in 2002.
Nirvana performed the song on MTV Unplugged in November 1993 with Lori Goldston on cello, and that version is where plenty of younger listeners land first. Goldston’s line sits higher and cleaner than Canning’s, the tempo drags further still, and it is worth hearing both before deciding which one to learn from.
