Michael Azzerad’s Nirvana biography titled Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana was published back in 1993. Now, in honor of its 30th anniversary, Azerrad is bringing the book up to date with The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, a “super-expanded” version that’s out October 24th, 2023.
The original version of the book was written in close collaboration with Nirvana and even co-signed by Kurt Cobain as “the best rock book [he’d] ever read.” And as Consequence of Sound notes, just seven months after the biography was published, Cobain died by suicide, completely re-contextualizing the stories Azerrad had just told — and designating Come As You Are as the only book about Nirvana to ever feature original interviews with all three band members.
“Rereading Come As You Are for the annotated edition, I began to notice some patterns that I hadn’t noticed when I was in the thick of writing the original version,” Azerrad says in a press release. “Maybe I was too young to see them; maybe I was looking the other way because I was smitten by my subject; maybe I had to work too fast to notice such things. The idea behind The Amplified Come As You Are is to comment on my 1993 book: to illuminate what’s there, and mine it for insights on Nirvana, its members, and the time in which the band existed.”
