Nevermind

It’s basically impossible for me to talk about Nevermind objectively. I recognize its canonical place as a cultural artifact, and that there is nothing unique about being one of the tens of millions of people for whom that album was literally life-changing. That doesn’t make it any less true. I played it for my parents, and I play it for my daughter. It’s unquestionably the most important music I’ve ever heard. It engaged and clarified murky looming interior early adolescent messinesses, introduced me to entire aesthetics and subcultures and sociopolitical sensibilities and non-traditional iterations of masculinity to which I am indebted to this day, encouraged me to write songs and yell and sing and play guitar and worry less about expertise and more about expression, and helped define whole friendships, installing in us a language we still speak fluently. It was keys and a map and a flashlight and a scalpel. It made things seem possible. It was a magic trick, a ubiquity that felt like an insurrection, something that was everyone’s and yours, too. We recorded this because we wouldn’t have done any of what we’ve done – or even known each other – without this record. It felt like a fitting tribute to its spirit to knock it out in a basement over a weekend. That’s how I learned it in the first place, 27 years ago.

— Kevin Devine via the album description on Bad Timing Records (November 2019)