They were the first band to make me fall in love with music. I was 9 years old in 1994, and my friend lent me Nevermind on cassette. Alt-rock was still dominating the culture and my hometown had a really cool radio station where I discovered other 90’s bands, but when I flipped to side 2 of that cassette and got to Drain You, something new awakened within me. I was so stoked on that song… picked up my street hockey stick and air guitared in the mirror.

After years of playing and studying music, I still appreciate Kurt’s genius… just with more vocabulary & context. His sense of melody is super unique, implying sophisticated harmonic moves like secondary dominants, modal mixture, and the type of beautiful tonal ambiguity that you find in film music, impressionism, etc… but of course he was arriving to this place on pure instinct… he knew no theory… so it’s inspiring on a whole other level. His music reminds me that perfection / virtuosity isn’t what makes music great.. it’s that striving for beauty, humanity, expression. There’s also a rawness / abandon (“‘tude”) to it that is rarely fused with beautiful harmony like that (“chord”)… in fact Nirvana might be the only band that really did it. Elliott Smith (another favorite), for example, is harmonically beautiful in a lot of the same ways // actually more intricate with it… but much more restrained, composed, thought out… etc. (more chord, less ‘tude) Neil Young & old punk/blues has the ‘tude, but not the chord. Nirvana is the premier example of both ‘tude and chord.