"Come as You Are" is a song by American grunge band Nirvana, written by frontman Kurt Cobain and released as the second single from the band's second studio album Nevermind in March 1992.
It was the band's second American top 40 hit, and second UK top 10 hit, reaching number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100, and number nine on the UK Singles Chart.
The unexpected success of the album's lead single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" drew Nirvana to mainstream success, with Nevermindbeing released two weeks after the single's release.
Following the album's release, the band and its management company debated whether to release "Come as You Are" or "In Bloom" as the next single from the album due to Cobain's concerns over similarity of the former with the Killing Joke song "Eighties" (1984).
After some persuasion by the management company, Cobain agreed to release "Come as You Are" as the second single because of its commercial potential.
Killing Joke were upset over the song, and there were rumors that a lawsuit had been filed over the song, though the suit never materialized. Killing Joke guitarist Geordie Walker was said to be upset about the whole situation, and he felt that Nirvana (which according to Walker denied the connection between the songs) handled the matter poorly.
The music video for "Come as You Are" was directed by Kevin Kerslake, who drew inspiration for it from the cover artwork of Nevermind. Rolling Stone ranked "Come as You Are" 445th on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time", and it placed 452nd on the 2010 edition of the list.
"Come as You Are" was one of the few new songs Nirvana recorded onto the rehearsal tape the group sent to producer Butch Vig prior to the recording of Nevermind in 1991.
The group recorded the song with Vig during album sessions at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, in early 1991. Cobain recorded his guitar solo in two takes, as well as three takes of vocals, of which the first was used.
Vig then asked Cobain to double track his vocals throughout the entire song. During the harmony overdub session, Cobain accidentally sang the phrase "And I don't have a gun" too early, appearing the fourth time he sings the word "memoria" after the guitar solo.
When this mistake was discovered, Cobain decided to keep it in the final recording. Vig sampled Cobain singing "memoria" from the middle of the song and placed it in the background of the song near the end twice.
The band also performed an acoustic version of the song on MTV Unplugged on November 18, 1993. The recording later appeared on MTV Unplugged in New York in November 1994.
The origin of the song's title is unclear, but Charles R. Cross speculated the song may have been named after a motto used by the Morck Hotel in Cobain's hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. The Morck was one of many places Cobain stayed in after leaving home for a time while he was seventeen years old.
The song begins with Cobain playing an unaccompanied guitar riff for eight seconds. Cobain used an Electro-Harmonix Small Clone guitar chorus pedal to give his instrument a "watery" tone during the verses and pre-choruses.
He is joined by the rest of the band for the first verse, which is moody and subdued. Once the band reaches the chorus, the song reaches full volume. The shift in dynamics is a technique Nirvana used on many of its songs.
The song features one of Cobain's longest guitar solos. "Kurt really did not play a lot of solos," Vig said. "This one is more of a melodic part based on the vocal melody. It's not trying to show off pyrotechnics. It complements the melody of the song."
Cobain described the lyrics of "Come as You Are" as contradictory, and said the song was about "people and what they're expected to act like".
Pointing to the line "Take your time, hurry up, choice is yours, don't be late", essayist Catherine J. Creswell writes that in Cobain's lyrics, "[p]hrases clump into strings of empty clichés whose own ostensible meaning is forced into contradictions or simple rhyme sound".
In light of Cobain's suicide in 1994, Allmusic's Mark Deming suggests that hearing "Cobain sing 'and I swear that I don't have a gun' gives 'Come as You Are' an edge it was never meant to have when [Nevermind] was first released in 1991."
Deming reasons that the "I don't have a gun" lyric is Cobain's "attempt to reassure listeners that ... his target is the world at large rather than the individuals in it, and that there was still room in this damaged world for everyone.
