Image Courtesy of The End of Music, LLC/HBOMontage of Heck is full of Kurt Cobain's own recordings and demos from the late rocker's personal archives, to which director Brett Morgen was granted access in order to make the film. When he completed Montage of Heck, Morgen realized that there was still a wealth of recordings that he didn't use in the film. That fueled his decision to put together a companion album, which will be released this fall in conjunction with the Montage of Heck Blu-ray/DVD release.
"It didn't begin as a project where we were trying to put together an album," Morgen tells ABC Radio. "It literally began where I was cleaning up my system, and I started going through all my favorite songs that we weren't able to incorporate [into the film]. And I realized that there was a tremendous amount of material that revealed sides of Kurt that I'd never heard musically."
Morgen describes that side of Cobain as "much more optimistic, upbeat and funny" -- words that have rarely been used to describe Nirvana's music.
"I think that part of that has to do with the fact he was alone in his apartment writing these songs, and that was always when Kurt was at his most content," Morgen says. "Now, we don't hear this because he was by himself, nobody knows what he was like, but I know because I heard audio tapes of Kurt. I've heard over a hundred hours of Kurt alone, and he laughs, and he's happy in those moments."
The demos on the album were taken from unmarked cassette tapes, which made it difficult to figure out when exactly a certain song was recorded.
"So what I had to do, in order to try to figure out what year this might have been composed, was listen very closely to everything else on a tape for any clues," Morgen explains. "Sometimes it would be background on a television, sometimes it would be the other songs that were being composed on that same tape that we can tell were done around the same time."
Morgen does note that since these songs were recorded by Cobain alone in his apartment, you shouldn't expect the audio quality to be on-par with a studio album. He compares it to the quality of the demos on With the Lights Out, a Nirvana box set released in 2004 filled with rare and previously-unreleased material.
"I think it's important for people to understand that these aren't songs that were recorded in a studio with a full band," Morgen tells ABC Radio. "This is Kurt and a guitar, and the album is meant to create an experience for the listener where they're sitting on the sofa in that room with him over the course of a sunny afternoon, or a rainy afternoon, while Kurt is creating some of these wonderful compositions."
Montage of Heck will be released in theaters on August 7.
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