Inside ‘Montage of Heck’ Album’s Trove of Unreleased Kurt Cobain
“I curated the album to create a feeling that the listener was sitting in Kurt’s apartment in Olympia, Washington, in the late Eighties, and bearing witness to his creation.” That is how Brett Morgen — the writer-director and co-producer of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the controversial HBO documentary about the Nirvana singer-guitarist’s early life, stardom and anguish — describes the film’s provocative, dizzying companion, Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, in an exclusive, detailed interview about the soundtrack, which will be released by Universal on November 13th.
“In many ways, it unfolds like a concept album,” Morgen goes on. “It’s a journey, an experience. We made the commitment that this wasn’t just about the musical experience,” a reference to the running collage of stark solo demos, manic sound designs and sometimes chilling spoken-word pieces across the deluxe 31-track edition of The Home Recordings, many of them put on cassette during Cobain’s spell living with early girlfriend Tracy Marander. “This was about celebrating all of Kurt’s creative efforts with audio experimentation.
“I’m a filmmaker,” Morgen points out. “This album was curated by the director. So there is a cinematic quality to it.”
Last spring, after I interviewed Morgen for a Rolling Stone cover story on his film and one of its key producers, Cobain’s daughter, Frances, the director sat at a table in his Los Angeles office and played for me a series of raw, often chaotic tracks he hoped to include on the soundtrack. These included Cobain’s private, haunted cover of the Beatles’ “And I Love Her” — heard in the film under home-video footage of the singer with his wife Courtney Love — and “Rehash,” a blast of fuzzbox turmoil that sounded like Cobain paying tribute to his Northwest-punk heroes the Melvins.
Both pieces are on The Home Recordings, along with early demos of Nirvana songs such as “Sappy” and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle”; the unexpected British-folk tinge of Cobain’s solo-guitar ode to his daughter, “Letter to Frances”; his telling, in the eerie reading “Aberdeen,” of an early suicide attempt; the harrowing, accusatory “She Only Lies,” a previously unreleased Cobain song; and the epic finale of “Do Re Mi,” a beautifully plaintive ballad that was among the last songs Cobain ever wrote and is finally released here in his full, original 11-minute demo. Everything on Home Recordings — in both the deluxe and abridged editions, the latter a 13-track “standard soundtrack” — comes from the 108 cassettes, containing more than 200 hours of audio, that Morgen found in the Cobain archive and listened to all the way through, as he researched his documentary.
“Everything I refer to will be related to the deluxe edition,” Morgen insists at the start of our interview, admitting his preference for the fuller tale told in that variation. He also notes this: “There’s nothing on the album that was previously released on any other Nirvana album or, as far as I know, in bootleg form.” Indeed, there is no Nirvana at all on The Home Recordings. Morgen briefly considered including some rare work Cobain recorded with bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl. Ultimately, the director states firmly, “The material that was of the most interest to me was Kurt-specific.”