some words wrong: the accidental power of sturgill simpson’s “in bloom” by jason nafziger

There are countless cover songs that change the original’s lyrics. Usually these differences are slight—a swap of genders or upgrade of technology—and rarely is their impact noticeable beyond the recognition of the new bit. When Bad Wolves add drones to the Cranberries’ “Zombie” arsenal, when the Ataris affix Black Flag over Don Henley’s Deadhead sticker in “Boys of Summer,” they may add an extra layer of depth, but the songs’ underlying messages remain.
It’s not a surprise. The idea, after all, is to pay tribute to those formative architects and idols. Even the more sarcastic endeavors (Dynamite Hack’s “Boyz In The Hood,” Me First and the Gimme Gimmes’ entire catalog) come from a place of admiration. There’s not exactly a lot of motivation to thematically gut a song you like.
So it’s something of a shock to a Nirvana fan when, as the early murk of Sturgill Simpson’s “In Bloom” unrolls and welcomes strings and horns—literally blooming into big band bombast, he trades Cobain’s enigmatic and open-ended “He don’t know what it means when I say” for the more pointed “He don’t know what it means to love someone.”
Officially, this was a screw-up, a mondegreen. Simpson simply thought that’s what the song said, the way I used to think Alabama’s “Mountain Music” had a line about playing baseball with “sugar drops.” His manager pointed out the error, but only after the album was done and had already been turned in to his label. To get the new version cleared, Simpson hand-wrote a letter of explanation to the Cobain estate. Eventually, fortunately, all was well.
Anyone who’s listened and, more importantly, sung along to pop music for long enough has gotten some words wrong now and again. It happens often enough that culture writer Gavin Edwards has penned four books’ worth of examples. It’s easy for the human brain, with just four minutes to decode the sonic jumble of a rock song, to put some of the pieces together wrong. And let’s be honest: Cobain’s vocals have never been celebrated for their intelligibility. So, sure, it’s believable enough that teenage Sturgill just heard the song wrong—perhaps subconsciously pulled in that direction by his parents’ recent divorce—and never bothered to verify (as I eventually did, only to find that Alabama’s baseball substitute was actually “chert rocks.”) There’s really no reason to doubt the story.
But still: the new lyric works so well, it’s hard to accept it as just a mistake. At best, the original version is, like so many Cobain lines, inscrutably poetic. At worst, it’s glorified folderol. Simpson’s update goes beyond the typical fresh coat of cover song paint; it is truly transformative. It might be folly to ever declare with confidence what any given Nirvana song is “about,” but the general consensus is that “In Bloom” was intended to criticize (or perhaps outright mock) the band’s growing legion of fans who don’t really connect with—or even notice—the underlying issues Cobain was writing about.
Simpson’s “In Bloom” elevates the song’s broad caricature—that “one” who likes to sing along and shoot his gun—to a true character, simply by shining a light on his emotional deficiency. Why doesn’t “he” know what it means to love someone? Is he the same stunted fratboy in designer flannel I imagine as the target of Cobain’s scorn? Maybe. But Simpson’s version doesn’t ask us to vilify him. Instead, we can see his macho posturing as an all-too-familiar shield for adolescent vulnerability. His brashness and lack of depth feels more like defense mechanism than douchebaggery. It strips him of agency. He’s not a willful asshole; he just doesn’t know. Sure, questions still abound, but unlike the original, this “In Bloom” points us in the direction of a singular, complicated human being rather than an archetype. And it does this with just those three words: to love someone. Three words that exist only through a malconstruction by teenage Sturgill’s brain.
A quick history of Sturgill Simpson: after his parents’ divorce, he started selling and experimenting with drugs, barely graduated high school, joined the Navy, and worked at a Seattle IHOP before moving back home to Kentucky. He decided to give music a shot, started a band that flamed out, met his future wife Sarah, and moved to Salt Lake City to work on the railroad. In what would become a recurring theme, Sarah—seeing Sturgill hit an emotional rock-bottom in Utah—bought him a four-track and shoved him back toward his passion for music. They moved to Nashville and he got to work on his debut album.
Over the next ten years, he would record five albums, each a sonic departure from the last, the sort of sharp turns in style that tend to throw a decent percentage of whatever fans have accumulated to the ditches. He followed any beasts of inspiration that called out to him in the moment, whipped them into a dazzling frenzy, set them loose, and started looking for the next herd.
His public persona mirrored his artistic audacity:
In 2016, the Academy of Country Music introduced the Merle Haggard Spirit Award. Simpson took to Facebook immediately to eviscerate the ACM over what he saw as exploitation. Haggard, Simpson explained, had come to hate the Nashville that “wouldn’t call, play, or touch him” as his career wound down. “If the AMC wants to actually celebrate … Haggard,” he chided, “they should drop all the formulaic cannon fodder bullshit they’ve been pumping down rural America’s throat for the last 30 years.”
In 2017, when Sailor’s Guide was up for the Album of the Year Grammy (against the likes of Adele, Drake, Beyoncé and Bieber), Simpson started imagining the nightmare scenario in which he pulled off a monumental upset. So he hatched a plan to accept and immediately leave the building, handing the trophy to Beyoncé on the way out. Adele’s 25 won instead, surprising no one.
In 2020, he did a single interview to promote his current tour—in support of an album he had already grown tired of—and opened it by lambasting the very concept of interviews and promotion. He had plenty of venom left over for his label, suggesting that the expensive accompanying anime was an effort to get dropped and hinting that he was hiding new material from them.
Simpson’s path to adulthood is familiar: wrestle with trauma, questionable choices, wanderlust and depression; grow dissatisfied with the workaday grind; find comfort and peace in relationships. The concept of A Sailor’s Guide to Earth is simple: a lyrical letter relating this struggle to his first son (he now has three). The album frequently meditates on the intersection of masculinity and love, and when he was looking for a song to cover, something that could represent the tumult of his teenage years, Sarah stepped in again. “What were you listening to when you were thirteen?” she asked.
The answer was obvious. For so many of us whose middle adolescence occurred in both the early ‘90s and the rural Midwest, Nirvana’s Nevermind holds outsized importance. Simpson himself consistently describes it as having been “like a bomb went off.” There was nowhere else to look for a suitable song that would complement his own.
Simpson was making an album for his son, to show him his journey from a troubled and desperate child of divorce to a man with the self-assurance to repeatedly bite the cultural and corporate hands that feed him because he wants to do what’s right. He chose “In Bloom” because he believed its message fit perfectly into his mission.
“I think it tells a young boy that he can be sensitive and compassionate,” he told Rolling Stone. “He doesn’t have to be tough or cold to be a man.” A solid lesson indeed and one Simpson’s “In Bloom” absolutely conveys, but Cobain’s does not.
At this point, I find it impossible not to ponder that alternate timeline, the one where teenage Sturgill hears the words right. The one where he grows up loving a different Nevermind, a different “In Bloom.”
Admittedly, it’s a negligible shift in our historical trajectory. (Although, you know, butterflies and whatnot.) Still, I wouldn’t be writing these words and you wouldn’t be reading them if we didn’t believe in the transformative power of song. I can say with confidence that I would be a different person without the songs that kept me afloat as a kid. I have to wonder: who would Sturgill Simpson be without the song that told him, as a young boy, that he could be sensitive and compassionate, that he didn’t have to be tough or cold to be a man?
Who will his sons be with it?

Jason Nafziger is a writer from Ohio. He has an MFA from the University of Illinois & work in the Tahoma Literary Review, Ninth Letter, and the regrettably defunct Solidago Literary Journal. His favorite cover song is Nirvana’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Follow him on Twitter @JasonNafziger for bad jokes, off-putting sports rants & Wordle scores.