Journals

In the months before his death in April 1994, Kurt Cobain was arguably the most famous musician on the planet. Nevermind had sold thirty million copies. Nirvana had changed what rock music could sound like and what it could mean. And Cobain himself — brilliant, in chronic pain, increasingly overwhelmed by the fame he had simultaneously craved and found unbearable — was filling notebooks.

These journals, reproduced here in facsimile exactly as he wrote them, reveal the full complexity of a man whom celebrity had flattened into a symbol. Here is Cobain thinking through his art: scratching out lyrics, sketching out ideas, trying to figure out what kind of band Nirvana should be and why the music mattered. Here is Cobain the reader, the visual artist, the obsessive craftsman. Here is Cobain in love, in pain, in the grip of an addiction he could not control. And here is Cobain’s sense of humour — dark, self-deprecating, and still, on almost every page, alive.

An essential document for anyone who cares about Nirvana’s music — and a portrait of a creative mind that is far more complex, and far more human, than the myth. Published by Penguin.