COME AS YOU ARE by Nirvana (Easy Guitar & Lyric Play-Along)

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Guitar Play-Along

This easy to follow, absolute beginner level, play-along video for guitar and vocals is in the key of E minor with no capo required. Scrolling chord chart format. If necessary, slow the tempo in the settings menu for practice purposes.

The original version of this song is tuned down a full tone; however I have modified this version to be played in standard tuning.

"Come as You Are" is a song by American grunge band Nirvana, written by frontman and guitarist Kurt Cobain. It is the third track and the second single from the band's second studio album Nevermind, released in March 1992. It was the band's second and final American top 40 hit, reaching number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100, and second UK top 10 hit, reaching number nine on the UK Singles Chart. The single reached the top 10 in eight countries and the top 40 in eleven further countries.

"Come as You Are" was one of the few new songs Nirvana recorded onto the rehearsal tape the group sent to producer Butch Vig prior to the recording of Nevermind in 1991. The group recorded the song with Vig during album sessions at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, in early 1991. Cobain recorded his guitar solo in two takes, as well as three takes of vocals, of which the first was used. Vig then asked Cobain to double track his vocals throughout the entire song. During the harmony overdub session, Cobain accidentally sang the phrase "And I don't have a gun" too early, appearing the fourth time he sings the word "memoria" after the guitar solo. When this mistake was discovered, Cobain decided to keep it in the final recording. Vig sampled Cobain singing "memoria" from the middle of the song and placed it in the background of the song near the end twice. The band also performed an acoustic version of the song on MTV Unplugged on November 18, 1993. The recording later appeared on MTV Unplugged in New York in November 1994.

Many have speculated the song to be about heroin, which Cobain was struggling with at the time of writing and recording. The lyrics "Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach" speak directly to a Seattle-area HIV prevention campaign from the time period encouraging addicts to sterilize their needles with bleach before using them with the tagline "If doused in mud, soak in bleach", and "As a friend, as a trend, as a known enemy", for some, was further allegory of addiction to the drug. After Cobain's death, Sub Pop records approached G. Alan Marlatt at the University of Washington to set up a memorial fund to establish an addiction treatment center titled the "Come as You Are" center, but the funding fell through after the record label was sold to Warner Music Group.

Cobain described the lyrics of "Come as You Are" as contradictory, and said the song was about "people and what they're expected to act like". Pointing to the line "Take your time, hurry up, choice is yours, don't be late", essayist Catherine J. Creswell writes that in Cobain's lyrics, "[p]hrases clump into strings of empty clichés whose own ostensible meaning is forced into contradictions or simple rhyme sound".

In light of Cobain's suicide in 1994, Allmusic's Mark Deming suggests that hearing "Cobain sing 'and I swear that I don't have a gun' gives 'Come as You Are' an edge it was never meant to have when [Nevermind] was first released in 1991." Deming reasons that the "I don't have a gun" lyric is Cobain's "attempt to reassure listeners that ... his target is the world at large rather than the individuals in it, and that there was still room in this damaged world for everyone". Others have suggested the lyrics regarding the "gun" are metaphors for escapism and turmoil found in heroin usage.

Lyrics

Come as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend
As an old enemy
Take your time, hurry up
Choice is yours, don't be late
Take a rest as a friend
As an old
Memoria, memoria
Memoria, memoria
Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach
As I want you to be
As a trend, as a friend
As an old
Memoria, memoria
Memoria, memoria
And I swear that I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
Memoria, memoria
Memoria, memoria
(No I don't have a gun)
And I swear that I don't have a gun
No I don't have a gun
No I don't have a gun
No I don't have a gun
No I don't have a gun
Memoria, memoria