#115, "Even In His Youth," Nirvana (1992)

150 Favorite Songs: #115, "Even In His Youth," Nirvana (1992)

What is there to say about Nirvana? If you were alive, and young, when Kurt Cobain was making music, you probably have a similar story to the one everybody else does—yep, I was a pre-teen who discovered music because of this band, and while "saved my life" is an overstatement, it kickstarted a lifelong passion that has brought me a great deal of joy, enhanced the best moments of my life, and made me feel less alone during the worst. Nirvana is not my favorite band, but if it weren't for them (and very quickly after R.E.M., and the Afghan Whigs, and the bands on The Crow soundtrack, and the Counting Crows, and Tori Amos—I think those were my first five or six albums), I would have had to find another entry point to this thing that has made my life much richer. It would have happened in any case, I suppose, but that's almost irrelevant. It did happen because of Nirvana.

Shortly after Kurt Cobain died, I went on a Nirvana hiatus for, oh, fifteen years or so. I mean, I would listen occasionally, but the band was so tied into something specific for me that it just didn't make sense to maintain a slavish devotion as I grew up. It wasn't that the songs were painful to me, or hard to listen to—I just didn't really know what Nirvana was going to be.

When I was 21, I worked for a very brief time at a Hot Topic, because I needed a job and they would hire me. I remember selling Kurt Cobain t-shirts to 13 and 14 year olds, and I wondered what on earth it could mean to them. I figured he'd become a Hendrix or a Morrison, a cultural touchstone of the past, that meant something about the kid who loved him, and the way that kid wanted to be seen by people who’d catch them wearing the shirt. (Now, of course, it’s thirty years later and Kurt Cobain still means something to young people today.)

Meanwhile you had Courtney Love and Dave Grohl—two people I like a lot—bickering and suing each other. You started to hear the songs in TV shows and movies, and I just didn't really know how to relate to all of those songs, given that everyone seemed to think they were just as Big and Important and Significant as I did. So I decided to let them have ‘em.

But "Even In His Youth"—that's about as good as any song Cobain ever wrote. It's aggressive and punky, with that absolutely massive drum sound that Grohl has always been so good at, while Cobain sings another song glorifying someone who everyone else thought of as a loser, one of the things that made his songs so relevant to so many kids. I held on to "Even In His Youth" in that time, because it was an obscure b-side, and this was in the time before the Internet made everything accessible to everyone, mostly, and so it was a little secret. It's also catchy as fuck, because Kurt Cobain really was as good a pop songwriter as there's ever been, like Lennon and McCartney rolled into one.

And so even though I didn't decide that I wanted to start listening to Nirvana again until I was older—once I stopped caring about the cultural significance of the band and just starting paying attention to how good In Utero still sounds—I kept "Even In His Youth" tucked away under the table. I'm not sure if it's my favorite Nirvana song. There's "Breed," and "Scentless Apprentice," and "All Apologies," and "Been A Son," and "Lithium," and—well, you get the point. But it's one that I always felt was more mine than the rest. It's hard to do that with a band like Nirvana.