Enlarge Reid Haitcock for NPR

Bryan Funck of Thou performs at the Black Cat.

Reid Haitcock for NPR

Bryan Funck of Thou performs at the Black Cat.

In thinking about Nevermind's 20th anniversary this week, Lars Gotrich is talking to artists who've covered Nirvana's "Something in the Way." We're calling the series About A Song.

Whether it's a brief flourish or a total swarm of unpredictable squeals and gurgling tweaks, there's something wrenchingly cathartic about feedback. And even though Nevermind's slick production stripped much of this away, Nirvana understood the power of feedback, especially live. The studio-recorded version of "Something in the Way" is quiet, but carries the weight of the world. It's a stark contrast to the band's 1991 BBC Session, a seething verse followed by a scathing, nearly shoegaze-noise chorus. This is the version vocalist Bryan Funck had in mind when the Baton Rouge sludge-metal band Thou set out to record "Something in the Way."

Listen: Thou, 'Something In The Way'

Something In The Way

• Artist: Thou
• Album: The Archer & The Owle

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The Archer & The Owl is available from Robotic Empire.

 

Thou might be my favorite Nirvana cover band. It's turned tracks like "Sifting" and "Aneurysm" into grueling, loud-and-heavy dirt-diggers. On the 40-minute EP The Archer & The Owle, Thou retains the quiet tension of the chorus (Funck actually sings!), but then launches into a feedback-strewn death crawl. It's relatively straightforward, but it really gets at the power struggle behind Kurt Cobain's original.

When I called Funck, he said that "Something in the Way" is about "being completely crushed and obliterated" and "[digging] yourself out of that hole." I can't think of a better way to describe it.

Enlarge Sarah Jurado

Damien Jurado.

Sarah Jurado

Damien Jurado.

In thinking about Nevermind's 20th anniversary this week, Lars Gotrich is talking to artists who've covered Nirvana's "Something in the Way." We're calling the series About A Song.

A bootleg of Damien Jurado's performance at the 1999 Bumbershoot Festival doesn't sound much different from what you might witness today: A quiet yet stage-bantering big guy sings sad, thoughtful songs with an acoustic guitar. This is what Jurado does best. But after telling a bad joke and expressing thanks that terrible singers like Bob Dylan can write such great words, Jurado ends the show with this: "A few years ago, we lost someone dear to us... and this song is actually one of his songs."

Jurado's performance of Nirvana's "Something in the Way" is hauntingly solemn. In many ways, its withered vulnerability has a lot in common with the following year's Ghost of David, arguably the bleakest entry in Jurado's excellent discography.

What comes out in this phone interview with Jurado about the song is not only a great story about getting mixtapes from a pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain, but also, more importantly, the disappointment of a punk-rock kid let down by an unspoken promise.

Enlarge Tim Owen

David Bazan as Pedro the Lion circa 2000.

Tim Owen

David Bazan as Pedro the Lion circa 2000.

In thinking about Nevermind's 20th anniversary this week, Lars Gotrich is talking to artists who have covered Nirvana's "Something in the Way." We're calling the series About A Song.

Before we hit Web 2.0, if you wanted a live bootleg, you had to know a guy or a series of guys and keep a stack of blank cassettes handy. But around the digital dawn of peer-to-peer sharing, tape traders started uploading their treasured recordings online. P2P sites like SoulSeek and Audiogalaxy weren't terribly organized, but somewhere down that not-so-legal wormhole, I came across Pedro the Lion's version of "Something in the Way."

Recorded at the 2000 Cornerstone Music Festival, the track came from a different time for David Bazan. As Pedro the Lion, he had released Winners Never Quit a few months prior — just a peek into the darkness that would set in during the albums to come. Maybe that's why this tape-warbled, solo live version of "Something in the Way" seems so fitting. But when I called Bazan in the middle of his latest "Living Room" tour to talk about Nirvana and where the song fits into his world now, Bazan said he's attracted to the song's hymn-like qualities. You can take the man out of the church...

Enlarge Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

Kurt Cobain performs on MTV's Unplugged in 1993.

Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

Kurt Cobain performs on MTV's Unplugged in 1993.

Sometimes a song just gets inside you: A chord, a beat or a howl finds a root and digs deep. It knows you better than your best friend, and it can help and hurt as much as one, too. Nirvana's "Something in the Way" is that song for me — or at least one of many.

I first heard it in high school, maybe six or seven years after Kurt Cobain committed suicide, after I'd picked up Unplugged (my first Nirvana album) at a used CD store. The song ached and creaked like a weathered shack; even for a late-'90s emo kid like me, "Something in the Way" tugged at a troubled psyche that was all too real. Its plodding simplicity is underscored by desperate yearning and a chord progression similar to The Wipers' "D-7." And, for many years, often out of nowhere, "Something in the Way" becomes an obsession, played on repeat and wrung out until the next cycle.

As a result, I've collected numerous outtakes, demos, live versions and covers of "Something in the Way." And, while the scathing, feedback-driven version for a 1991 BBC Session is currently my most spun, it's the covers that peel back the song. In thinking about Nevermind's 20th anniversary this week, I'll publish interviews with two Seattle-ites — David Bazan and Damien Jurado, high-school buddies who saw Nirvana unfold in the early '90s — and with Bryan Funck of the Baton Rouge sludge-metal band Thou. In their own distinct ways, all three of these artists have covered "Something in the Way," telling a story not only about the song, but themselves.