Kurt Cobain Album Coming This Summer, Says Montage of Heck Director
In a recent interview with Bedford + Bowery, Montage of Heck director Brett Morgen reveals he is sitting on a treasure trove of unheard and unreleased Kurt Cobain material.
When they asked Brett Morgen whether there were any still-unreleased gems amidst the 200 hours of audio he combed through in order to create his new documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, he gave them the most exciting answer imaginable: “We’re going to be putting out an amazing album this summer that I think will answer that question.” The album of home recordings, Morgen said, “will feel like you’re kind of hanging out with Kurt Cobain on a hot summer day in Olympia, Washington 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.”
Says Morgen, “I go and open a box and out comes a big collection of videotapes. Nobody had mentioned to me there were going to be videotapes or home videos there, so that was a big find. And then I opened up another box and there were 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. And nobody had told me about that. And it goes to show you that it’s not really the size or the quantity, because obviously cassettes and film don’t take up a lot of space. So even though the boxes looked rather small they contained a treasure chest of material that would serve as the foundation for Montage of Heck.”
In the interview he was asked what kind of stuff was on the tapes:
Morgen states, “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 mix tapes 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. As that would essentially serve as the basis of this movie, because I wanted to make a film in which Kurt could tell the story of his life in the best way he could — not through sharing it to an interviewer, because that was never a format that Kurt was that expressive in, but through his art, through the very reason we’re talking about him.”
Go HERE to read the full interview with Bedford + Bowery.
Read our review of Montage of Heck HERE and our interview HERE