About a Girl

The song's harmonic identity comes from the contrast between its two sections. The verse is nearly static — Em and G cycling — while the chorus breaks open with chromatic power chords that sit outside the natural E minor scale. That dissonance never feels jarring because Cobain's melody holds the thread. Beatles-influenced in its economy, grunge-inflected in its chromaticism.

Cobain wrote 'About a Girl' in 1988 while living with his girlfriend Tracy Marander in Olympia, Washington. The song captures the friction in their relationship — Marander was working to support them both while Cobain focused on music — though he never told her it was about her. She only found out after reading Michael Azerrad's 1993 Nirvana biography Come As You Are. The earliest known recording is a solo electric home demo, with alternate lyrics, taped at Cobain's Olympia home in 1988 and posthumously released on With the Lights Out in November 2004.

Written in 1988 after Cobain spent an afternoon with Meet the Beatles!, 'About a Girl' stood apart from Bleach's sludgier tracks with its clean, pop-leaning riff and confessional tone. When Nirvana performed it acoustically on MTV Unplugged in November 1993, the version became the first posthumous Nirvana single — hitting #1 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart in October 1994. The song exists in two equally famous lives: underground album track and post-Cobain cultural document.