Corey Taylor says Nirvana’s landmark ‘Nevermind’ album “changed” people’s approach to songwriting.
The Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman has hailed the Kurt Cobain-fronted Grunge pioneers’ iconic 1991 LP ahead of its 30th anniversary on Friday (24.09.21) for shaking up the music landscape.
The ‘Before I Forget’ hitmaker admitted he played the record – which topped the US Billboard 200 chart and included classic singles ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Come as You Are’, ‘Lithium’, and ‘In Bloom’ – non-stop for “six months” as he learned to play “every song”.
And the 47-year-old heavy metal legend revealed he was lucky enough to have heard some “dubbed copies” of the band’s songs early on and knew they were going to be huge before they released ‘Nevermind’.
Corey told Consequence of Sound: “I had heard some dubbed copies of some of the Sub Pop 7-inches that they had released, so I was aware of Nirvana before they set off their nuclear bomb.
“[‘Nevermind’] wasn’t as sludgy as [debut album] ‘Bleach’ was, but the songs were so refined at that point. And the production — Butch [Vig] did an incredible job on that album. It changed the way people thought about songwriting.
“The first time I got [the album], I must have worn it out for six months. I literally sat down and learned how to play every song on the guitar. I learned how to sing every song on that damn album.
“It is one of the best hard-punk-fusion-pop albums of all time.”
Corey paying tribute to ‘Nevermind’ comes after the group’s former drummer, Dave Grohl, admitted their goals for the album were to emulate Sonic Youth and then buy their own apartments.
He said of their humble ambitions: “When we pulled up to Sound City, as much of a s***hole as it was, it was the most legitimate recording studio I had ever been in at the time.
“Knowing the history of that place, we thought, ‘Now, this is the real deal’. That being said, nobody thought that it was going to be what it became.
“We thought, ‘Hopefully we’ll get to achieve the success of a band like Sonic Youth, and each get to have our own apartment!’ That was the extent of our ambitions.”
‘Nevermind’ was the first album Dave played on since joining the group – completed by Krist Noveselic and late frontman Kurt – and he still can’t wrap his head around the band’s rise after the release.
He said: “Well, I still haven’t figured the whole f****** thing out. What I do know is that once we signed to the David Geffen Company and made a video, it started feeling a bit more professional.
“Now we were doing in-stores and signing posters. We had a rock video that was on MTV.
“It started feeling a bit more legitimate, but it wasn’t until the tour started that I realised, ‘Oh, something is going on.'”