News ‘Heart Songs’: the Weezer track inspired by Nirvana.
Although many of his lyrics have been challenged as indecipherable, at points, Kurt Cobain could be as explicit as even the most confrontational punks. He took the world to task over a host of issues in his short time in the sun and provided numerous resonant moments with Nirvana.
While drug addiction, macho men and troubled love were three areas that Cobain was adept at examining in his distinctive way, he also used his music to air frustrations from his childhood and the disarray stoked by his parent’s divorce. Although he might have explained that the composition was purposely a “ridiculous” pop song, ‘Sliver’ is a track that provides more insight into his early years than most.
The frontman was acutely aware that the raw effort has “massive naïveté” to it, as he told biographer Michael Azerrad, and evidently, it was intended to be ironic, but it does make you wonder how much of the famous lyrics are semi-autobiographical. Take the opening verse, for instance, the oddly specific words: “Mom and dad went to a show / They dropped me off at grandpa Joe’s / I kicked and screamed / Said ‘Please, don’t go’”.
Given the nature of the lyrics and the song’s generally infectious sound, it was given a second release the following year, preceding Nirvana and grunge taking over the world. As ‘Silver’ was never included on a studio album, it remains one of the trio’s most impactful stand-alone singles and is, interestingly, the only track to feature Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters.
A classic of the alternative rock genre, the song directly influenced Weezer’s creative figurehead, Rivers Cuomo. Notably, the band broke onto the scene with their acclaimed self-titled grunge-pop fusion in 1994, but it wouldn’t be until 2008’s The Red Album that Cuomo would explicitly draw on ‘Sliver’.
According to Cuomo, the first time hearing ‘Sliver’ directly “inspired” him to express feelings in music, an experience he channelled into The Red Album track ‘Heart Songs’. He told Rolling Stone: “I was working at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in the spring of ’91, and another cashier, Harold, said, ‘Hey, Rivers, I know something you might like. It’s called Nirvana.’ As soon as I heard ‘Mom and Dad went to a show,’ I immediately started dancing around. It was exactly how I felt, and they were putting it to music. It inspired me to do the same thing.”
An ode to Cuomo’s youth, which references many of the artists that have influenced him, he told MTV News that it ranged from “Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald’ when I was five to Nirvana’s Nevermind.”
