Listen to Kurt Cobain’s Previously Unreleased ‘Sappy’
Weeks before its official release, Kurt Cobain fans have their first opportunity to hear his freshly polished, long-archived demo for the Nirvana rarity "Sappy."
As previously reported, "Sappy" is scheduled to arrive in stores Nov. 13 as part of Kurt Cobain — Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, the soundtrack to director Brett Morgen's critically acclaimed Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, which is being released on DVD/Blu-ray the same day. The song will return to shelves the following week as a special 7" single that also includes Cobain's take on the Beatles' "And I Love Her."
Cobain returned to "Sappy" repeatedly during his brief career, demoing it in the late '80s — the version you hear here dates back to 1988 — and testing various versions with Nirvana in the early '90s. The version most often heard, recorded with Steve Albini in early 1993, ended up on the No Alternative compilation as an unlisted bonus track, and later surfaced on the band's With the Lights Out box as well as being appended to the anniversary edition of In Utero; another version was released as part of Sliver: The Best of the Box, while yet another take on the track was added to the deluxe edition of Nevermind.
Like most Nirvana-related rarities, "Sappy" has been heavily bootlegged over the years, but the Montage of Heck version represents fans' first opportunity to hear Cobain's home recordings cleaned up by professionals. The audio fidelity is still obviously pretty dodgy, but completists will nevertheless find it hard to resist — or at least that's what Universal seems to be counting on with the release of a super deluxe edition of the soundtrack, which adds 48 minutes of bonus interviews, a cassette version of the soundtrack, a 160-page hardbound book and assorted non-musical goodies that include a puzzle, a Montage of Heck poster, postcards and a Cobain bookmark.
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