How a happy Kurt Cobain song became a suicide note

The final Kurt Cobain lyric that was never meant to sound like a goodbye It's hard to argue that any lyric Kurt Cobain ever wrote as the frontman of Nirvana could serve as a more appropriate or suitable farewell than the literal goodbye he wrote on a piece of paper just hours before taking his own life in 1994. That message, while partially a personal one to his wife and daughter, was also written with a clear understanding that the general public would want to know why he'd chosen to end what had seemed like a very rewarding and successful life. Cobain's explanation, which has since routinely been simplified to an issue of 'not being able to handle stardom', was actually quite a bit more nuanced and outward-looking than that. 'I have it good, very good, and I'm grateful,' he wrote, 'But since the age of seven, l've become hateful towards all humans in general. Only because it seems so easy for people to get along that I have empathy. Only because I love and feel sorry for people too much, I guess.' He signs off with the words 'peace, love, empathy', as well, emphasising that, even for all the pain it caused him, he still believed in being empathetic; in having thoughtful sensitivity toward other people as a baseline of human decency. The idea, in a perfect world, was that we'd all respect one another because we're all essentially the same. Cobain usually avoided any suggestion that he'd called his band Nirvana out of a genuine interest in Buddhist concepts, but perhaps as a result of his youthful love of The Beatles, he did develop a curiosity about some of the tenets of Eastern philosophy, and they sometimes found their way into his work and overall worldview. In a 1991 interview with the Italian magazine Tutti Frutti, when asked for the 100th time about any link between Buddhism and Nirvana's music, Cobain was unusually more direct with his reply: 'The secret is all about letting go,' he said, 'It's because through our music we release our tension, our rage, and all our frustrations. We find at the end that we enjoy it and most of all that we make other people feel good, people that come to our gigs.' This notion of interconnectedness and selflessness was, on one hand, essential to what made Kurt Cobain such a magnetic and powerful performer, but it also became part of his curse, as he couldn't find the means to disconnect from the wider world in a safe and healthy way. Sometimes, Kurt's fans had a similar struggle disconnecting from their emotional tie to him. Credit: Alamy The very last track on the final Nirvana studio album, for example, 'All Apologies', is often seen as a sort of accompaniment to Cobain's suicide note, a direct attempt to deal with his frustration and failures as an individual: 'Find my nest of salt / Everything is my fault / I'll take all the blame / Aqua seafoam shame'. On closer inspection, though, 'All Apologies' isn't a song about giving up because of one's mistakes, but releasing oneself of that emotional burden. The secret, just as Kurt said of the relationship between Buddhism and his band's name, was 'about letting go'. Under that interpretation, at least, the final repeated line of the song, 'All in all is all we all are,' fits right in as a positive mantra: a bit of twisty pretzel logic, perhaps, but one that basically suggests we're all part of the same thing. In the sun, we all feel as one. Because so many of us listened to In Utero in the weeks and months after Cobain's death, hearing the CD conclude with that mantra, it took on a much sadder and darker undertone, but it's not the takeaway that Cobain likely intended. 'I have become a lot more optimistic,' he told the LA Times around the time of In Utero's release, 'Once something like marriage and a baby happens to a person, you find a lot of strength that you didn't know you had.' While Cobain would almost always shy away from revealing the true meaning of any specific song, he gave away hints when it came to 'All Apologies', and they always aligned with that optimistic mindset. In 1993, he directly told biographer Michael Azzared that the feeling of the song was 'peaceful, happy, comfort; just happy happiness'. The seemingly confessional lyrics, he added, didn't really 'have any relevance at all', despite the fact that he'd dedicated the song to Courtney Love and daughter Frances Bean at one of its early performances at the 1992 Reading Festival. For conspiracy sleuths who've read into one specific line from 'All Apologies' for 30 years, it should also be noted that the 'married, buried' bit wasn't any sort of statement on Kurt's feelings about his life as Courtney Love's husband. 'That was another line that was written before Courtney and I started going out,' he told Rolling Stone's Jim DeRogatis. Some great rhymes just take on a life of their own.