All in all is all we are

Nirvana - 'All Apologies' (In Utero - 1993)

For a band as famous and influential as Nirvana, there’s never been a definitive goodbye as a piece of musical output. In Utero is, of course, their third and final studio album, but it doesn’t function in the way a planned last album or something like Joy Division’s Closer, which came out after Ian Curtis’ death, does. MTV Unplugged In New York serves that purpose and has even sold more copies in the USA than In Utero. Since then, we’ve had more live albums, box sets and documentaries as we see from any 20th-century legacy act in the 21st-century.

Cobain wrote the melody to ‘All Apologies’ at least as far back as 1990, recorded a demo that sounds like it could feature on R.E.M.’s Out of Time in early 1991 and performed the song live a few weeks after the release of Nevermind. For a couple of demos, it progressed from something with a more folk/pop feel to something that has an abrasiveness, especially with some of Cobain’s more strained vocals on the Steve Albini version that isn’t ultimately on the album. Despite this, it was viewed as a halfway house along with ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ to work as gateway singles to the more abrasive parts of the album¹.

I think there are two reasons why the band thought ‘All Apologies’ had that gateway potential. firstly, Kera Schaley’s swooning cello gives the song an otherness that wouldn’t usually be associated with the band.

Secondly, and most important in my view, is the melody. We know that Cobain had a gift for writing Beatlesque, almost bubble-gum pieces, right from the off that underpin early songs ‘Sliver’ and ‘About A Boy’. We’ve also seen that he included Meet The Beatles! The Liverpool quartet’s 2nd US album, in a handwritten list of his favourite 50 albums. For me, the melody is so strong and so memorable it was no surprise that the Roackbye series adapted it as a lullaby in 2006. The 2nd demo that we have heard via archive release on With The Lights Out is key to joining the studio version that ends In Utero and a child’s night-time cradle song . That low-key and lo-fi demo showcases the intimate and claustrophobic nature of the tune.

Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dumb’ also features Schaley’s cello, and there is a lyrical connection with the “easily amused” refrain from ‘All Apologies’ referenced in a 1993 Melody Maker interview about the subject matter of ‘Dumb’;

“That’s just about people who’re easily amused, people who not only aren’t capable of progressing their intelligence but are totally happy watching 10 hours of television and really enjoy it. I’ve met a lot of dumb people. They have a shitty job, they may be totally lonely, they don’t have a girlfriend, they don’t have much of a social life, and yet, for some reason, they’re happy.”

I think the use of the same cellist, The Beatlesque melodies (even more so on ‘Dumb’) make the connection that Cobain in the album closer is addressing part of the lyrics to the person in ‘Dumb’.

I am not sure exactly how much the post-fame impact of Nirvana’s second album had on the lyrics here; we know that the song was at least committed to tape early in 1991 and originally had a title of ‘La, La, La’. Given that songs like ‘Serve The Servants directly address Cobain’s newfound fame and the inner workings of his private life becoming public property, it surprises me that there is very little change in the lyrics across the official released versions. There is, perhaps, a wariness and surrender about the tone that doesn’t exist in the previous versions. Are lyrics being sung as a mock apology? The questions posed around “what else could I write” certainly seem rhetorical. I find those opening dozen words or so remarkable. At the same time, they manage to mock critics and fans from the ones Cobain already called out on Insecticide’s liner notes and those who hang on his every word.

The enduring image I have from writing this piece is the revelation from Bobcat Goldthwait in 2016 that he brainstormed a video for the song in which Lee Harvey Oswald sat in the book depository with a rifle along with the band. Knowing that MTV would not run a video with guns, they discussed Cobain throwing a meringue at the back of his bandmates’ heads as if they were JFK.

Cobain said to Michael Azerrad in 1993 that despite the sense of dreadful inevitability we might get from the song to him, it was about contentment. He explained that the lyrics might not fit concerning his family, but the feeling does. After that Zen-like take on the song, it seems that ending with that mantra ‘All in all is all we are’ as the last words from a band in the studio, it ranks up there with “And in the end, the love you make…” from Abbey Road despite that latter having far more deliberate intent. The song itself has had a remarkable shelf life after release, from the MTV Unplugged version right through to Lorde singing it, backed by Novoselic and Grohl at the band’s admission to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.

It is one of the finest songs by one of the finest bands of the last thirty years, and as a result, I can only view it as one of the very best songs that will feature on this project as a song, as a way to end an album and - unwittingly, an epitaph.

Thank you for reading this first full entry in the catalogue - I hope that I will be able to publish two or three a week. Please comment, subscribe, share and all that good stuff to get word of mouth out there.

1. DeRogatis, Jim (2003). Milk It!: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90's. p18 Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-81271-1.