Heart-Shaped Box
by Nirvana
- 99
- BPM
- F# major
- Key
- 2B
- Camelot
- 50
- Danceability
- 20
- Acousticness
Kurt Cobain wrote the riff for "Heart-Shaped Box" in a closet. It was early 1992, and he and Courtney Love shared an apartment in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. Love later recalled hearing him work it out in about five minutes, and said she knocked to ask whether he had a riff for one of her songs. He shouted at her and slammed the door.
Cobain set it aside, then picked it up again after they moved to the Hollywood Hills. The band could not get anywhere with it at first, he said, until one jam session when the vocal style came to him all at once. Nirvana first played it live on January 16, 1993, at the Hollywood Rock Festival in São Paulo. Producer Steve Albini recorded the final version in February 1993 at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, using a strobe light to hint at the beat for drummer Dave Grohl. Scott Litt later remixed it, adding vocal harmonies and guitar by Cobain.
DGC released it as the lead single from In Utero on August 30, 1993. No single was sold in the United States. American radio played it anyway, all the way to number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. It was the last song Nirvana played at their final show, in Munich on March 1, 1994.
Heart-Shaped Box runs at 99 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.42 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 606 ms. It is in F# major, Camelot 2B, which shares its notes with Eb minor and mixes cleanly with B major and Db major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.