"About a Girl" is a song by the American grunge band, Nirvana. It is the
third song on their 1989 debut album, “Bleach”. It is also the first song on the
posthumous MTV Unplugged in New York album from which it was a single in 1994.
History
Dating back to at least 1987, "About a Girl" is often considered to be Kurt
Cobain's first great pop song. It is also perhaps the closest he ever came to
writing a traditional love song.
According to the 1993 Nirvana biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana by
Michael Azerrad, "About a Girl" was written after Cobain spent an entire
afternoon listening to Meet the Beatles! repeatedly. At the time, Cobain was
trying to conceal his pop songwriting instincts, and he was reluctant to include
the song on “Bleach” for fear of alienating the band's then-exclusively grunge
fanbase. "To put a jangly, R.E.M. type of pop song on a grunge record, in that
scene, was risky," he admitted in a 1993 Rolling Stone interview.
However, “Bleach”'s producer Jack Endino was excited about the song, and even
saw it as a potential single. Years later, Butch Vig, who produced Nirvana's
1991 breakthrough album Nevermind, would cite "About a Girl" as the first hint
that there was more to Nirvana than grunge. "Everyone talks about Kurt's love
affair with...the whole punk scene, but he was also a huge Beatles fan, and the
more time we spent together the more obvious their influence on his songwriting
became," Vig told the NME in 2004.
"About a Girl" was recorded for Bleach in December 1988 by Endino in Seattle,
Washington. It remained one of the few songs from “Bleach” which Cobain
continued to perform live until his death in April 1994. The acoustic MTV
Unplugged rendition, recorded in 1993 and released posthumously on MTV Unplugged
in New York in 1994, is perhaps the most familiar reading of the song.
