The lyrics couldn’t be more plain. “He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs,” sang Kurt Cobain, “and he likes to sing along / And he likes to shoot his gun / But he don’t know what it means / When I say …” In Bloom, from Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, is a song by someone who’s come to represent something he doesn’t recognise; someone who looked at his audience and saw it changing from a small coterie of the Seattle underground to beefy guys who liked to mosh, who loved that Nirvana kicked ass, and who five years earlier would have been bellowing along to Mötley Crüe. And who thought: who are these people? Why are they following me?

The great unspoken fact of music is how uncomfortable musicians get with their audiences. It’s not that they don’t want to be admired and recognised – rare is the artist who craves obscurity – but more that once their image is formed in the public mind it becomes a straitjacket, or an iron lung, as Thom Yorke put it. It’s what gives them a livelihood, but it’s also what confines and suffocates them.



“I always assumed it was written about the distance Kurt felt from his fans, as well,” says writer Everett True, a friend and frequent interviewer of Cobain. “I assumed it was directed towards the fans who would show up at concerts with signs saying Evenflow [a Pearl Jam song] on one side and Rape Me – I think – on the other: the fans who did not understand there was a point of difference between Nirvana and other Seattle bands or media representations of grunge. I’ve always associated the song with [In Utero single] Rape Me. Like they’re a pair.”



In Bloom began as a markedly different song to the one that emerged with the release of Nevermind on 24 September, 1991. Nirvana had been hammering a C90 in their touring van; on one side was the Swiss extreme metal pioneers Celtic Frost, on the other was the New Jersey powerpop band the Smithereens. “That tape was always getting played, turned over and over again. I think back now and go, ‘Yeah, maybe that was an influence,’” bassist Krist Novoselic told Rolling Stone in 2002. The earliest versions of In Bloom, he said, sounded like the hardcore punk band Bad Brains, before it was slowed down.



Nirvana first recorded the song in April 1990, at Smart Studios in Wisconsin, with Butch Vig producing – that version eventually emerged on a Sub Pop video compilation the following year. Vig realised immediately that the band had undergone a change since recording their debut album, Bleach. “They still had the punk attitude, but they were really really hooky songs,” he said. “In Bloom was an amazingly hooky song when that chorus comes in.” A little over a year, they reunited with Vig at Sound City in Los Angeles, where the Nevermind version was recorded.



In Bloom continues to resonate with musicians. The Grammy-nominated country star Sturgill Simpson – a man whose audience is likely to include fair proportion of men who like to sing along and shoot their guns – performs it on his new album A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, in a version that starts as a weeping country ballad, before transforming into a southern soul belter. Ezra Furman has taken to performing it in concert, in a Motown-inspired version, alongside his own punk-rock-goes-doo-wop originals, and his covers of the Velvet Underground, Arcade Fire and the Replacements.



“It wasn’t until I started performing it that I remembered what first made me like the song a lot – the chorus,” Furman says. “That idea of there being people in the audience who do not get our band, they’re into it but totally missing the point of it.” As his profile has risen, Furman has faced his own straitjacket: he’s become the chaotic kid in makeup and women’s clothes. He’s found himself turning up to magazine photoshoots in men’s clothes only to be told he has to wear a dress, because someone else wants to present a particular vision of him.



Though his audiences, certainly in the UK, seem to pour out their love for him, he detects a disconnection between the complex, manic personality he’s trying to express in his songs and what people are hearing in the joyous, old-fashioned rock’n’roll he’s playing. “I don’t think they are all people I would want to be friends with or particularly get what I’m about as a person,” he says. “As an artist there are always people who are there who want to sing along to all the pretty songs – and they don’t know what it means.” The result, he says, is “creative dysphoria”.



“I am frustrated at misconceptions of me, and being cast in a role,” he says. “I was sorting that out in my songwriting and performances from the start. I could tell right away how I was perceived by people, which is inherent I guess in trying to do something real in a society that does not value reality.”



Simpson’s version seems to have a less complex genesis. “I remember in seventh or eighth grade, when that album dropped, it was like a bomb went off in my bedroom,” he writes in the liner notes to his new album. “For me, that song has always summed up what it means to be a teenager, and I think it tells a young boy that he can be sensitive and compassionate – he doesn’t have to be tough or cold to be a man. So I wanted to make a very beautiful and pure homage to Kurt.”



But he, more than Furman, is someone who’s been trapped by public and critical perceptions of him. Simpson’s second solo album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, saw him hailed as the man to return country music to its prelapsarian state, to strip away the beers-and-guns trappings of “bro country” and revive the outlaw spirit of hard country. But being acclaimed as the genre’s saviour was something that made him desperately uncomfortable. Like Cobain, he had been someone very much on the outside, who suddenly found his hand being shaken and his back being patted at every turn.



“Nashville is a very insider town. And I was definitely on the outside at the time,” he told me last year. He said that he didn’t have a problem with the bro country and pop country worlds – after all, music is a business, and country music is very much a business – but he also said: “It seems to me that country became fashionable and trendy, and I looked round [and saw] all these people in costumes, cos that’s how it’s supposed to be. And that’s great. For the tourists.” And as for being the saviour of country music, as writers had started to claim: “There’ll be another one along next year. They said the same shit about Steve Earle 20 years ago.”



Maybe Simpson did want to record the song to send a message of compassion to teenagers. But given that southern soul, not Waylon Jennings, is the dominant influence on his new album, it’s not a stretch to think he’s also sending a message with his recording of In Bloom. And while he changes the final line of the chorus – from “You don’t know what it means when I say …” to “You don’t know what it means to love someone,” he told Zane Lowe on Beats 1 that it had simply been a mistake that wasn’t noticed until after the album was finished.



What makes the song distinctive, Furman says, is its “odd, grungey chord progression”. The verses – based around two spirals, one descending, one ascending, both from B flat – create a mood of tension, released on the chorus, which shifts between the B flat and a G fifth, a classic power chord. The result – an irony Cobain must have been aware of – was a song to which it’s all but impossible not to sing along.



Which is where the men who like to shoot their guns come in …