Beyond the Charts - Articles - Zimbio: The Five Best Songs Written About Kurt Cobain

Beyond the Charts - Articles - Zimbio

The Five Best Songs Written About Kurt Cobain Feb 20th 2013, 21:47 (Getty Images)Kurt Cobain would have been 46 today, had he not taken his own life nearly two decades ago. It's impossible to fully describe the impact his too-brief life left on modern music, as the list of artists who cite him as a seminal inspiration stretches on without end. He touched too many people. Maybe it's enough to just listen to some of the finest songs inspired by Cobain's time on earth. "Tearjerker," Red Hot Chili Peppers One Hot Minute's "Tearjerker" plays out like an earnest love letter to Cobain, with lyrics like "I iked your whiskers / and I liked the dimple in your chin / your pale blue eyes." Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman later explained that Cobain's death had been "an emotional blow, and we all felt it. I don't know why everyone on earth felt so close to that guy; he was beloved and endearing and inoffensive in some weird way. For all his screaming and all of his darkness, he was just lovable." "About a Boy," Patti Smith Patti Smith didn't know Kurt Cobain, but she wished she had. "I was heartbroken when he committed suicide," Smith told Seattle Weekly in 2010. "I loved Nirvana ... [My husband and I] felt so badly. We just wished that we would have known him, and been able to talk to him, and had some positive effect on him." "Mighty K.C.," For Squirrels Sadly, Gainsville, Florida's For Squirrels is better remembered for the band's own tragedy than for the mournful single that became their lone radio hit, "Mighty K.C." Two members of the band were killed in a car accident just a month before the release of their major label debut, Example. "Sleeps With Angels," Neil Young Kurt famously quoted Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" in his suicide note, writing, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." Young, who had attempted to reach out to Cobain before his death, seemed to comment on the ordeal in his song "Sleeps With Angels" which includes the repeated line, "He sleeps with angels (too late)/He sleeps with angels (too soon)." "Let Me In," R.E.M. Michael Stipe, too, had tried to help Kurt Cobain in his last days. He told Interview in 2011 that he'd sent a plane ticket and a driver to Cobain's Seattle home in the hopes of arranging a collaboration, as "an excuse to reach out to this guy." When that failed, he wrote "Let Me In" about his ill-fated attempt, with the haunting line, "I only wish that I could hear you whisper down / Mister fisherman, to a less peculiar ground."

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