Never released as a single and never a consistent part of the band's live setlist, "Something in the Way" charted for the first time in August 2020, after appearing in the first trailer for the 2022 superhero film, The Batman.
The earliest known version is a solo electric demo that appeared in a medley, along with the abandoned compositions "You Can't Change Me" and "Burn My Britches," first released on the Cobain compilation Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings in November 2015.
American director Brett Morgen, who compiled the album as a soundtrack to his 2015 Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, discussed the medley in a 2015 NME interview, saying it was "almost like a rock opera, and to hear 'Something in the Way' emerge from the ashes of those other tracks was quite revealing.
[9] Vig was impressed with the way Cobain's solo rendition sounded, and after turning off the air-conditioning and unplugging the telephone in the control room, set up microphones and recorded the song this way instead, starting with the guitar and the vocals.
"Dave was used to playing much louder; plus, it can be very difficult to go back and lay drums over an acoustic guitar track, as the meter may vary a bit".
On the final day of the Nevermind sessions, Kirk Canning, a friend of the band's they had met through L7, added cello to the recording,[9] although he too had difficulties tuning to Cobain's guitar.
On November 9, 1991, a version of the song was recorded by Miti Adhikari for the BBC program The Evening Session at Maida Vale Studios in London, England.
"[11] "Something in the Way" was originally believed to be based on a period when Cobain was homeless and slept underneath the Young Street Bridge, close to his childhood home in his native town of Aberdeen, Washington.
[12] Both confirmed that Cobain "hung out" under the bridge, which was a popular recreation area favored by local teenagers, but Novoselic told author Charles R. Cross that the river's "tides" and "muddy banks" would have made staying there for a prolonged period of time impossible.
At first, Cobain slept "curled up like a kitten" in a cardboard refrigerator box on the porch of Dale Crover, drummer of local band, the Melvins.
[12] Cobain himself suggested that the song was not necessarily autobiographical, telling Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad that the lyrics were "like if I was living under the bridge and I was dying of AIDS, if I was sick and I couldn't move and I was a total street person.
Oliveri told author Greg Prato that he remembered Lanegan "kicking himself in the butt a little bit about that" later on, knowing that "he would have had a lot of money" if he had received a songwriting credit on the song.
[19] In 2017, to mark what would have been Cobain's 50th birthday, the Phonographic Performance Limited released a list of the 20 most played Nirvana songs on the TV and radio in the UK, in which "Something in the Way" was ranked at number 17.
[7] Personnel adapted from Nevermind liner notes[1] Nirvana Additional Performer The MTV Unplugged version of "Something in the Way" was one of two songs not included in the original broadcast of the show.
The intentionally poor rendition appeared during a hotel room scene in which "Cush disrupts football business talk with a nasally, out-of-tune take on Nirvana’s darkest track off Nevermind," according to Ashley Zlatopolsky of Billboard.
[27][28] On April 24, 2020, American musician Post Malone performed the song during his 15-song Nirvana tribute concert, which was livestreamed on YouTube and raised more than $4 million for the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
So I started making this connection to Gus Van Sant's Last Days, and the idea of this fictionalized version of Kurt Cobain being in this kind of decaying manor.
"[31][28] In a March 2022 NME interview, American actor Paul Dano revealed that the song also influenced his portrayal of the film's villain, the Riddler.