Reaching Nirvana

the artist's process, Kurt Cobain and mining my obsessions

Over the weekend, my husband and I listened to an episode of Artist Friendly with Joel Madden (yes, Joel of Good Charlotte lol) on the way to my brother’s hockey game. I saw a clip of it on Instagram, where I follow Brandon Boyd, the lead singer of Incubus. He was Joel’s latest guest. Brandon is a particularly interesting person. He is not only the singer-songwriter of the band, but he’s an amazing painter as well. He writes a Substack called A Wink and a Nod. He has a unique, sort of soothing presence with an old soul hippie aesthetic and a dope Mandela back tattoo. My husband introduced me to Incubus when we first started dating, and now we have gone to at least seven of their shows together in the last eight years. It's always an amazing time, no matter the city or season. We’ve made trips just for the concerts—to Myrtle Beach, Atlantic City. We saw them twice when we lived in California. 

Going to live shows makes me feel part of what they are doing, of their art. I think that’s why live music can feel so spiritual. I love that feeling of leaving a concert— half deaf and worn out —but a little more alive. 

On the podcast, Brandon talked about his songwriting process. 

“To me, writing songs is painting. They are so similar. They are different in very clear ways and the results are different. But a lot of the results are very similar, too. A painting is a more tangible, touchable version of the process. The wider process. I think that’s why I love it.” 

When he has a melody in his head, and he’s playing around and refining it, essentially, he is painting. 

I found myself nodding along.  My novel writing process is similar.  The first few drafts felt like sketches, quickly drawn skeletal structures made with pencil. Now, in my fourth draft, I’m adding dimension and texture. I’m adding lots and lots of color—each revision like tiny brush strokes. (okay, sometimes massive, wide-sweeping brush strokes too). But even in this short statement from Brandon, I love that I can feel commonality with an artist I admire. That feels important. I think that's why I’m so obsessed with learning about other artist’s processes.

As an interviewer for the last five years, one of my favorite questions to ask writers is about their writing routine or how their story ideas germinate and take shape. And it's not just so that I can try to copy them. Of course, I’ve received tons of profound advice that I’ve utilized in my own process. But the purpose of the question, I think, is a way of connection— one artist to another. 

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There have been many impactful artists in my life, but one that evokes the most memories is the band Nirvana. 

I was eighteen when I was introduced to the band by my sixteen year old sister. She brought home the Nevermind CD after hanging out with a boy she half-heartedly liked (poor feller). I remember the connection to the album was almost instant. 

This was a time in my life when I was hungry for music. I had a video iPod, and if I didn’t want to purchase an album off iTunes, I downloaded the songs individually off some pirated site or YouTube. I would spend hours adding the album covers to the files, making sure the songs were in the right order. But I was also researching, and discovering bands and albums with a partial interest in music that was created before I was born. Nevermind was released when I was a baby, like the naked one on the album cover. 

But also because we were teenage girls, ones who still had celebrity posters on our walls, part of falling in love with Nirvana had to do with Kurt Cobain. 

With his bright blue eyes and long, greasy blonde hair, Kurt was beautiful to us. His gravelly voice, his complex and poetic song lyrics, his sweaters filled with holes and tattered Converse sneakers—he was unlike anyone we knew in real life. And he was dead.

We were blessed to have made it that far in life without anyone we loved dying. But now we loved him, and he wasn’t there anymore. We memorialized him on our walls, shuffling through the posters at Hot Topic until we found just the right one. We posted his pictures on our Tumblr profiles. We watched Nirvana music videos on YouTube. In the grainy interviews from MTV, Kurt was so cool and oblivious—sometimes from drugs, sometimes because he just didn’t care about being famous. 

We had physical copies of all of their albums. We thought it was disrespectful and invasive that Courtney Love had Kurt’s drawings and journals published into a book (we could never imagine the humiliation if our diaries were published, even if we weren’t alive to witness it), and so despite sneaking peeks at Newbury Comics, we didn’t buy it on principle. We spent hours on eBay, finally winning a haul of four vintage Nirvana concert t-shirts. (I still have one of mine today. I had to cut the sleeves off because of a gaping hole in the armpit, which felt immoral, like I was standing over a person with my kitchen scissors about to chop off their hair.) 

me in 2016 + the shirt I didn't want to cut

Nirvana became part of our family's lore—woven into stories we remind each other of every now and then. Our mother, hearing grunge music reverberating off our pink bedroom walls, calling up the stairs, “Turn down that devil music!” 

Remember when Breydan, our brother, was two years old, we say. We have videos of us babysitting him with Nirvana’s In Utero album blaring in the background. We pointed to Kurt's picture on the wall. 

“Who is that?” we asked him. 

“Kurt Cobain!” our brother chirped in a playful melody. We clapped like we did when he first learned to eat with a spoon. He’s going to grow up so cool, we thought. We are showing him things. 

Once, at a sleepover, when my sister and my cousin were up talking in the middle of the night, pondering the mystery of Kurt's untimely and suspicious death, the poster of Kurt that was tapped to the wall suddenly unpeeled itself, crashing to the floor. They screamed. 

Once, I woke up, blurry-eyed and confused, confessing to my sister, “I think Kurt came into my room last night.” I didn’t know if I believed in ghosts, but I had felt a presence at the foot of my bed and had thought I’d seen a thin frame in a striped sweater. My sister looked at me wide-eyed, and then we laughed, half brushing it off and half wondering if we would be chosen for such a thing. 

the poster

My sister got a copy of Heavier than Heaven, a biography of Kurt's life written by Charles R. Cross. She was sluggish for days after reading the tragedies of Kurt's short life— the poverty, the addiction, the neglect, that time he lived under a bridge. I read it shortly after, plunging into those emotional depths along with her. And it was as though a new layer of connection was formed. We understood his lyrics a little better; we felt like we understood him. 

*

I still listen to Nirvana often. They have even found their way into my most recent creative work, a short story I have out on submission right now called “The Daddy Club.” It's about a lot of things, but at its core, it’s a sister story.

Although the relationship between the sisters in the story is much different than the one me and my sister share, for me, sisterhood, in general, has always been about connection through the mutual obsessions of our youth. I revisited one such trueish moment for the story.

Here’s an excerpt. 

“Hey!” She jumps onto her knees, her face lighting up. “You’ll come right home after work tonight, right? Reggie fixed the DVD player. I’ll have the stuff ready.”

Lex found a used copy of MTV Unplugged in New York Live with Nirvana at the Salvation Army. It was one of our favorite CDs and we couldn’t wait to watch the DVD version of Kurt playing guitar in a pea-green grandma sweater surrounded by funeral flowers. That little detail, that the stage was decorated with stargazer lilies, made Lex swoon, “Oh that is just so Kurt.” She had a huge crush on him even though he was dead. She wanted the night we watched the DVD to be ceremonial so before we knew the DVD player was broken, we had gone out to Stop and Shop to purchase a bottle of strawberry milk and a couple packs of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Lex had read somewhere that these were the only foods that made Kurt’s chronic stomach pain ease and she liked the idea of consuming his remedies while we watched him sing. I had stood there with the shopping basket weighing down my arm (we had needed regular milk, more cereal and bananas just for general eating) while Lex debated out loud which pasta shape Kurt would have eaten because the book she had read hadn’t specified.  

         “Like I could see him choosing spirals, but I could also see him choosing shells. Or what if there was a shape back then that they don’t make anymore.” She held a box in each hand and kept moving them up and down like a scale, literally weighing her options.

         “Well, he was a heroin addict,” I said. “So, he probably just chose whatever box he saw first. Try walking into the aisle again and pick whatever one your eye lands on immediately.”

Lex liked this idea and we ended up with the classic tube shape. But when we realized the DVD player wasn’t working, we had to postpone much to Lex’s dismay. I was upset too. I couldn’t remember the last time I had tasted strawberry milk, but Lex wouldn’t let me open it until the time was right.

         “I’ll ask if I can get cut first,” I say now. It’s always hard to say no to my sister.

*

Loving a band becomes part of our identities, I think. During my junior year of college, I was in an American Gothic class. One of our assignments was to pick something we liked and find the gothic elements we had been learning about within it. We had to make a presentation in front of the class. I was wildly disappointed when most of the projects were on horror movies, something that is so obviously gothic there wasn’t too much to say about it. I prided myself on my dissection of Nirvana’s music videos, which are riddled with gloomy settings, disturbing and warped imagery, and to me, all had an element of dark romance to them because, well, there was Kurt’s face. My teacher was impressed, and since I can still remember it today, it must have felt important to me. I think it was when I was starting to come into my own as a writer, or at the very least, I was learning not to be afraid to talk about what I was interested in.

It was, I’m the type of person who listens to Nirvana—see? I keep diaries and scribble in the margins of my notebooks. I can think outside of the box. Loving an artist is more than just their music or their work. It’s everything.

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In that podcast episode, Brandon Boyd said that if we as artists have a cultural function, he likes to think of us as translators. 

“We have something inert in us that is hell bent on making sense of our experience here…the mediums we choose as artists are sense-making apparatuses and we are doing our best to make sense of the chaos in our own lives.”

I think that goes for what art you are obsessed with, too. These things that have influenced me as a person and as a writer have also fostered my relationships, especially with my sister, encouraged me to speak up, and inspired my fiction. They helped me make sense of myself. 

My sister and I no doubt romanticized Kurt— the tortured artist, the boy with a guitar and a notebook full of lyrics and fucked up doodles that only further explained his tormented mind. But I’m always looking for a way to understand my teen obsessions because they were so urgent, and I was so devout. I wouldn’t be who I am today without them—my own kind of sense makers. One artist to another.

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Ps. Courtney did it.