"Heart-Shaped Box" is a song by the American grunge band Nirvana, released as the first single from their third album, In Utero, by DGC Records on August 30, 1993. It was written by the vocalist and guitarist, Kurt Cobain. It was one of two songs on In Utero remixed by Scott Litt due to the Geffen executives dissatisfaction with the mixing by the producer, Steve Albini. The Litt remix also featured additional vocal harmonies and guitar by Cobain, which were the only elements on the album's 12 main tracks not recorded during the original sessions with Albini in February 1993.
Cobain explained that "Heart-Shaped Box" was written about children with terminal cancer. In a 1994 Rolling Stone interview with David Fricke, Love recalled hearing Cobain work on the guitar riff for the first time:
<blockquote>The only time I asked him for a riff for one of my songs, he was in the closet. We had this huge closet, and I heard him in there working on 'Heart-Shaped Box.' He did that in five minutes. Knock, knock, knock. 'What?' 'Do you need that riff?' 'Fuck you!' Slam. [Laughs] He was trying to be so sneaky. I could hear that one from downstairs.</blockquote>
Cobain briefly set the song aside, then resumed work on it after he and Love moved to an apartment in Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles. Nirvana's first attempts to work on it were unsuccessful; Cobain said he waited for bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl "to come up with something but it just turned into noise all the time". Eventually, during one jam session, Cobain said he "came up with the vocal style instantly and it just all flowed out real fast. We finally realized that it was a good song." Producer Craig Montgomery recalled hearing the song during the band's soundcheck in São Paulo, saying that "even then Kurt knew this was the single ... All the other [new] stuff they had was way more noisy and abrasive than this. Even the other sound guys that were out there on the platform with me were going, 'Yeah, this is a good song.
In a 2013 Rolling Stone interview with Fricke, Grohl recalled that "everyone was concerned about the tempo of 'Heart-Shaped Box.' But click tracks were not cool. Kurt and Steve came up with this idea — we should use a strobe light [laughs]. We had this long conversation about how it won't dictate the tempo, just imply the tempo. ... I sat there for a take or two with this fucking strobe light in my face until I practically had a seizure."
Despite his overall satisfaction with the recording, Novoselic was unhappy with the original effect used during the song's guitar solo, and recalled arguing with Cobain and Albini about it:
<blockquote>These were the words I said: 'Why do you want to take such a beautiful song and throw this hideous abortion in the middle of it? And they're like, 'Well, I don't know, it sounds good.' They didn't have any arguments, because they were sabotaging it is what they were doing.</blockquote>
Remix
The guitar effect was eventually removed when the song was remixed, along with second single "All Apologies", by Scott Litt at Bad Animal Studios in Seattle in May 1993, several months before the album's release. Cobain and Novoselic had agreed that the vocals and bass were too quiet in Albini's original mix of the album, and elected to have the two future singles remixed. Litt's remix of "Heart-Shaped Box" also featured newly recorded vocal harmonies and acoustic guitar by Cobain.
Later performances
On September 25, 1993, the band performed "Heart-Shaped Box", along with "Rape Me", on Saturday Night Live at NBC Studios in New York City. It was their first show with second guitarist Pat Smear.
"Heart-Shaped Box" was the final song played at Nirvana's last show, on March 1, 1994, at Terminal 1 of Munich-Riem Airport in Munich, Germany.
Composition
"Heart-Shaped Box" is a grunge and alternative rock song that lasts for a duration of four minutes and thirty-nine seconds. According to the sheet music published at Musicnotes.com by BMG Rights Management, it is written in a time signature, with a moderate tempo of 100 beats per minute. Garr wrote that "while the song does reference [cancer], the lyrics appear more to address the physical and emotional dependencies inherent in relationships."
Cobain's unused liner notes for In Utero, first described in Heavier Than Heaven and published in Journals the following year, featured an explanation for "Heart-Shaped Box" that "fell completely apart", according to Cross, "but touched on The Wizard of Oz, I Claudius, Leonardo da Vinci, male seahorses (who carry their young), racism in the Old West, and Camille Paglia". In a 1993 interview with Circus, Cobain explained that the chorus lyrics "Hey / Wait / I've got a new complaint" were a reference to how he believed he was often perceived by the media.
In 2012, Love wrote on Twitter that "Heart-Shaped Box" was about her vagina. Tweeting to the American musician Lana Del Rey, who had covered the song at a concert in Sydney, Australia, the previous week, Love wrote, "You do know the song is about my Vagina right? 'Throw down your umbilical noose so i can climb right back,' umm ... On top of which some of the lyrics about my vagina I contributed." The tweets were deleted shortly after.
Release
"Heart-Shaped Box" was released as In Utero's first commercial single on August 30, 1993, on CD, cassette tape, and 7-inch, and 12-inch vinyl record formats. The single was released in Europe only and peaked at number five on the UK Singles Chart, making it their highest-charting song there. All copies of the single featured the Grohl-composed "Marigold" as a B-side, while 12-inch vinyl and CD editions also included the In Utero track, "Milk It".
In the United States, DGC sent promo copies of the song to American college, modern rock, and album-oriented rock radio stations in early September. The label did not actively court Top 40 radio, with Geffen Records' head of marketing explaining that "Nirvana didn't sell nearly 5 million [records] because of a hit single. They sold that many albums because of who they are". DGC employee Mark Kates stated that "Generally we don't release commercial singles because we feel it cannibalises album sales" with fellow employee Jim Merlis adding that "European singles are released because overseas there's a whole singles market". However, the single was available in the US in limited numbers as an import release.
"Heart-Shaped Box" entered the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart at number seven, and eventually peaked at number one on the chart. The song also reached number four on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. In Israel, it was voted in at number 27 on the IBA's "Voice of Israel" singles chart in September 1993. It was also voted in at number 13 on Poland's LP3 chart in 1993.
Critical reception
Reviewing In Utero for Rolling Stone, Fricke called "Heart-Shaped Box" "the kind of song Stone Temple Pilots couldn't write even with detailed instructions", and cited it as evidence, along with "Dumb", that if Generation X "is ever going to have its own Lennon — someone who genuinely believes in rock & roll salvation but doesn't confuse mere catharsis with true deliverance — Cobain is damn near it". Phil Alexander of Kerrang! wrote that "on the current single Heart-Shaped Box, the sublime All Apologies ... and the convalescent croon of Penny Royal Tea, [Cobain] re-stakes his claim as one of his generation's most absorbing songsmiths." John Mulvey of the NME called the song "a strangulated, semi-f-ed-up anthem of sorts for a generation who fell in love to 'Teen Spirit' and are now as disturbed as Kurt by a growing sense of maturity".
Legacy
In his review of Nirvana's eponymous greatest hits album in 2002, Will Bryant of Pitchfork wrote, "I've always considered 'Heart-Shaped Box', with its elliptical guitar figure and explosive choruses, to be one of Cobain's most accomplished compositions. For all its heavy-handed symbolism, the song strikes deepest to Cobain's preoccupation with birth, the menstrual cycle, and female anatomy, wound tightly with primal tension in the verses and released with sublime catharsis in the choruses." Andrew Romano of The Daily Beast called it "as close as Cobain ever got to a perfect song", with "a perfect music video to match".
In 1999, the song was voted number 10 in Kerrang! magazine's "100 Greatest Rock Tracks Ever!" The Guardian and Kerrang! ranked the song number one and number two, respectively, on their lists of the 20 greatest Nirvana songs. In 2022, Pitchfork readers voted it the 30th best song of the 1990s. In November 2025, the song surpassed one billion streams on Spotify.
20th anniversary version
A second "Heart-Shaped Box" single was released in September 2013, to promote the 20th anniversary re-release of In Utero. The three-track promo CD single was included with the first 2000 copies of the "Super Deluxe" edition of the re-issue, and featured Albini's original mix of the song and a remix prepared by Albini in 2013 as B-sides.<br />
Music video
alt=|upright|thumb| [[Anton Corbijn, director of the "Heart-Shaped Box" music video, pictured in 2012.]]
Preliminary work
The "Heart-Shaped Box" video was the only music video made for In Utero, and the last video released by the band. Cobain had originally approached American filmmaker Kevin Kerslake, who had directed the band's last four music videos, for the songs "Come as You Are", "Lithium", "In Bloom", and "Sliver", to direct it. Five treatments were prepared by Kerslake between July 14 and August 12, and included scenes of Cobain kissing American author William S. Burroughs, whom Cobain had wanted in the video, and the band hanging by their necks from tree branches. However, no shoot arrangements were made, and by the end of August, the group had elected to work with Dutch photographer and video director Anton Corbijn instead.
Corbijn believes he was chosen to work on the video on the recommendation of Love, and cited his connection to Echo & the Bunnymen, a rock band from Liverpool, England where Love briefly lived and whom Love admired. According to Corbijn, Cobain had asked to be sent the music videos he had directed for Echo & the Bunnymen shortly before receiving a fax from Novoselic with drawings and ideas about a Nirvana video.
As Corbijn recalled, Cobain's proposed treatment for the video was "incredibly precise. More precise than I've ever had for a video. I loved it, but initially I was a bit taken aback that somebody came up with so many ideas, because generally my videos are my own ideas ... But then I looked at it and I thought that actually it was pretty good. I was very amazed by somebody writing a song and having those ideas as precise as he did." According to Novoselic, Cobain's original treatment was two pages long; Novoselic recalled typing it on his new laptop while Cobain dictated.
In a 2013 interview with Andrew Romano of Daily Beast, Corbijn recalled "a really eerie moment" where the actor playing the video's elderly man, "fell down while walking, on the set. He had some kind of bowel cancer, which he didn't know. Something broke open. There was blood everywhere. We had to get the ambulance, and he had to go to the hospital straight off. It was really severe." According to Corbijn, the old man was the most difficult to cast because finding "an old man who looked like an old man in L.A. was not so easy ... In the end we found this fantastic man who had a jazz club or a jazz station on the radio, something like that."
Synopsis
The "Heart-Shaped Box" video begins and ends with the band watching the elderly man on a hospital bed being administered medication through an IV drip. Most of the video takes place in what Garr called "a surreal 'outdoor' setting; a field of bright red poppies with a large cross standing in the middle, adjacent to a wood of creepy old trees (both elements in key scenes in The Wizard of Oz)." During the song's first verse, the elderly man, wearing a Santa Claus hat and loincloth, climbs onto the cross, which is covered by crows. The second verse introduces the young girl in what appears to be a Ku Klux Klan robe and peaked hat reaching for human fetuses in a tree, and the overweight woman in a human organ body suit with angel wings affixed to her back, similar to the winged anatomical model on the cover of In Utero. At one point during the second verse, the girl attempts to chase the three crows from the cross while the old man, now wearing a mitre, is tied to it.
During the song's guitar solo, the girl's hat is blown off her head and falls into a puddle in the poppy field, where it turns black. A brief shot during the solo reveals a fetus in the IV drip. The third verse features Cobain singing directly into the camera without his guitar, while Grohl and Novoselic stand behind him in a room with stars on the walls. The room is actually a box designed by Corbijn with a large heart on top, but the band initially disapproved of the way it looked, and Novoselic asked that it not be filmed from a distance. A brief shot of the box, with the heart above, appears at the start of the final chorus.
The band is featured performing with their instruments during the first two choruses, and without their instruments in what appears to be the same star-decorated box, zoomed out to reveal a bed, nightstand with a lamp on it, and rocking chair, during the final chorus. Both the sky and the walls of the box are blue during the quieter verses, and red during their heavier choruses and the solo. During the video Cobain repeatedly charges the camera, and his face moves in and out of focus until he falls out of the rocking chair.
In his interview with The Daily Beast, Corbijn estimated that he came up with "maybe 15 percent" of the video's ideas, with the rest being Cobain's. "The big woman, for instance, was my idea", he explained. "For me that was Mother Earth. There were a few other things, like the mechanical birds and the fake butterflies and stuff." According to Garr, Cobain had originally wanted to use real animals. Both the "Original" and "Director's Cut" versions of the video appeared as bonus footage in 2013 on the Live and Loud DVD, which was issued as a standalone release as well as part of the 20th anniversary In Utero "Super Deluxe" package.
Lawsuit
On March 9, 1994, Kerslake sued Nirvana over the "Heart-Shaped Box" video, alleging copyright infringement. According to Nirvana: A Day by Day Eyewitness Chronicle by Carrie Borzillo, Kerslake discovered that he would no longer be directing the video on August 28, 1993, and sent a letter to Corbijn to ensure that none of the images in his five treatments would appear in the final video. Kerslake's lawsuit stated that both Cobain and Nirvana's record company had approved Kerslake's third treatment for the video, with Cobain describing it as "Perfect".
On September 1, 1993, Cobain called Kerslake and invited him to the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards the following day, where Kerslake's video for "In Bloom" was nominated for Best Alternative Video. Kerslake accepted the invitation, and joined the band onstage after they won the award. Soon after Kerslake wrote Cobain a letter, addressed to "kurdt", thanking him for the invitation but expressing his unhappiness over reports that his alleged ideas had been used in Corbijn's shoot. Cobain did not respond, but a meeting was set up between attorneys and the record label to discuss the video.
The case did not affect the video's distribution, and was ultimately settled out of court. In 2019, Cobain's former manager Danny Goldberg discussed the lawsuit in his Cobain biography Serving the Servant, writing that "after the video was aired, Kerslake sued Kurt, claiming, absurdly in my opinion, that he was responsible for the idea of 'Heart Shaped Box.' Kurt was deeply offended. After he died the remaining members of Nirvana settled with Kerslake."
Reception
The "Heart-Shaped Box" music video was the number one most played music video for four weeks on MTV in the US as recorded by Billboard magazine. It charted at number ten on the CMJ New Music Report multi-channel US music video chart. It was also number one on Canada's MuchMusic Countdown for two weeks in November 1993. The video won two MTV Video Music Awards in 1994, for Best Alternative Video and for Best Art Direction. Since the ceremony was held after Cobain's suicide in April 1994, the awards were accepted by surviving bandmembers Grohl, Novoselic and Smear. "Heart-Shaped Box" also topped the music video category in the 1993 Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll. The video was also placed into active rotation on MTV Europe and power play on The Box in the UK and Ireland. It was also played on Rage in Australia.
Cobain was pleased with the video, saying that it came "closer to what I've seen in my mind, to what I've envisioned, than any other video." According to Corbijn, Cobain responded by telling him he would "never make another video if you don't do it. And he didn't." That same year, Time magazine placed "Heart-Shaped Box" on its list of "The 30 All-Time Best Music Videos", where it was described as "beautiful and ... terrible".
In February 2016, Grohl reunited with actress Kelsey Rohr, who played the girl in the "Heart-Shaped Box" music video 23 years earlier, at the age of six. Rohr stated that "Today reminded me that I peaked at 6 years old but I was the most badass kid on the playground. Today was the absolute coolest. Or in Dave's words seeing each other today was a 'historic moment'! What a legend!"
Track listing
All songs were written by Kurt Cobain except where noted.
CD single and 12" vinyl
- "Heart-Shaped Box" – 4:39
- "Milk It" – 3:52
- "Marigold" (Dave Grohl) – 2:33
Cassette and 7" vinyl
- "Heart-Shaped Box"
- "Marigold" (Grohl)
US 12" vinyl promo single
- "Heart-Shaped Box"
- "Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip" (Cobain, Grohl, Novoselic)
2013 20th Anniversary promo CD single
|align="center"| 1
|-
|-
!scope="row"|Belgium (VRT Top 30 Flanders)
|align="center"| 18
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!scope="row"|Canada Contemporary Album Radio (The Record)
|align="center"| 21
|-
!scope="row"|Denmark (ANR North Jutland)
|align="center"| 28
|-
!scope="row"| East Central Europe Airplay (Music & Media)
|align="center"| 9
|-
!scope="row"| European Hot 100 Singles (Music & Media)
|align="center"| 16
|-
!scope="row"| Finland (The Official Finnish Charts)
|align="center"| 9
|-
|-
!scope="row"| Iberian Airplay (Music & Media)
|align="center"| 7
|-
|-
|-
|-
|-
!scope="row"| Portugal (AFP)
| style="text-align:center;"|4
|-
|-
!scope="row"| UK Singles (MRIB)
| style="text-align:center;"|4
|-
|-
!scope="row"|UK Airplay (ERA)
| style="text-align:center;"|14
|-
!scope="row"|UK Rock & Metal Singles (CIN)
| style="text-align:center;"|1
|-
|-
|-
!scope="row"| US Progressive Retail (CMJ)<br /><small>Import CD</small>
| style="text-align:center;"|20
|-
!scope="row"| US College Radio Top Commercial (CMJ)
| style="text-align:center;"|3
|-
!scope="row"| US College Radio Top Cuts (CMJ)
| style="text-align:center;"|2
|-
!scope="row"| US AOR Tracks (Radio & Records)
| style="text-align:center;"|2
|}
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"
|+1995–1996 weekly chart performance for "Heart-Shaped Box"
!scope="col"|Chart (1995–1996)
!scope="col"|Peak<br />position
|-
!scope="row"|Denmark (Tracklisten)<br /><small>Charted on the singles chart as part of the Singles box set</small>
| style="text-align:center;"|5
|-
!scope="row"|France (SNEP)<br /><small>Charted on the singles chart as part of the Singles box set</small>
| style="text-align:center;"|17
|}
{|class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"
|+ 2013 20th anniversary release chart performance
! scope="col"|Chart (2013)
! scope="col"|Peak<br>position
|-
!scope="row"|UK Physical Singles Sales (OCC)
| style="text-align:center;"|97
|}
Year-end charts
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+Year-end chart performance for "Heart-Shaped Box"
!scope="col"|Chart (1993)
!scope="col"|Position
|-
!scope="row"| US Album Rock Tracks (Billboard)
|align="center"|35
|-
!scope="row"| US Modern Rock Tracks (Billboard)
|align="center"|28
|}
Certifications
Other releases
- A live version, from the band's performance for MTV at Pier 48 in Seattle on December 13, 1993, appeared on the Live and Loud DVD, released in September 2013.
- A live version, recorded at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California on December 30, 1993, appeared on the live compilation, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, released in October 1996. The full concert will be released on the 30th anniversary "Super Deluxe" edition of In Utero in October 2023.
- The 30th anniversary "Super Deluxe" In Utero reissue also includes the band's concert at the Seattle Center Arena in Seattle on January 7, 1994, which featured a version of "Heart-Shaped Box."
References
Other sources
- Azerrad, Michael (2013) .
- Cross, Charles R. (2012) .
External links
- "Heart-Shaped Box" review by Marc Deming on AllMusic
- "Still Moving: Photographers' Music Videos" – The New Yorker article featuring commentary by Anton Corbijn about "Heart-Shaped Box" video
- Usage in film and television: see "Nirvana – Soundtrack. 'Heart-Shaped Box'"at IMDb