Kurt Cobain's Home Recordings to Reportedly Be Released as Solo Album

BY Alex HudsonPublished May 1, 2015

By now, we all know that the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck includes some unreleased music from the late grunge star's archives. According to director Brett Morgen, these home recordings will provide the basis for a solo album from the Nirvana singer.

Morgen told Bedford + Bowery [via Pitchfork] that, in searching through Cobain's belongings, he found "107 cassettes featuring over 200 hours of never-before-heard or rarely heard music — I mean I would lean heavily of the never-before-heard, probably 95 percent."

This material provided the basis for an "amazing album," which is expected out this summer. Morgen said that listeners "will feel like you're kind of hanging out with Kurt Cobain on a hot summer day in Olympia, WA, as he fiddles about. It's going to really surprise people. Just to be clear, it's not a Nirvana album, it's just Kurt and you're going to hear him do things you never expected to come out of him."

As for what the tapes actually contained, Morgen said, "The audio ran the gamut from jam sessions with Courtney, some jam sessions with various friends and Nirvana, his first demo tapes, his Fecal Matter demos, his mixtapes and oral canvases like Montage, a lot of silly spoken word stuff and not-silly spoken word stuff like the story he told of losing his virginity, covers of the Beatles songs, it just ran the gamut. And a lot of sound effects and a lot of sound design."

Of course, a number of home recordings from Cobain's archives have emerged over the years, and we've already heard some snippets of the new music that's included in the new documentary. Stay tuned for more details regarding the planned archival album.

Meanwhile, Montage of Heck is being shown in theatres before coming to HBO on May 4.

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