First time I would have heard Nirvana’s ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ was when I got ’round to listening to In Utero in full for the first time around 2013. ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, from the same album, I’d known for a long time – but that specific year had some weight into my decision to getting round to the whole record so late, as it was the 20th anniversary of its release. The second half of In Utero is where things go off the deep end a little bit, but in the middle of the whole anti-accessible aesthetic that it goes for comes one of the album’s most accessible tracks in ‘Pennyroyal’.

Had Cobain not chosen to go out the way he did in 1994, ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ would have been the next single from Utero to get the music video treatment, the chart placement, the radio airplay. All of the usual. Once you hear it, you can easily understand why. The quiet verses consist of nothing but two lines, wasting no time on each iteration to emphatically transition into the cathartic choruses where the instrumentation is cranked up to eleven. Kurt Cobain belts out those long drawn out notes in ’em, and with all of that together he had made another “grunge” classic. Obviously, it’s never reached the heights of nearly everything that preceded on Nevermind, but those who know know just what a special song this is.

Plain and simply, it’s a about a very, very depressed person (most likely autobiographical) who drinks pennyroyal tea to at least try and somewhat numb the pain and carries out other mundane activities (listen to Leonard Cohen music, taking antacids and drinking warm milk). All of which really don’t help in any way and make the narrator feel even more sorry for themselves than they already do on a regular basis. After the last line in the last chorus is sung, the tempo slows and slows with Cobain quietly groaning with each cymbal crash as if each hit is slowly taking the life out of him. Pretty telling way to really get across the great exhaustion of the narrator in question. As it’s maybe agreed that it’s Cobain singing about himself, it really puts the whole song into perspective.