Cover art for Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana

Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle

Nirvana
Track 5 on In Utero 

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Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle Lyrics

[Guitar Solo]

[Verse 1]
It's so relieving to know that you're leaving
As soon as you get paid
It's so relaxing to know that you're asking
Wherever you get your way
It's so soothing to know that you'll sue me
It's starting to sound the same

[Chorus]
I miss the comfort in bein' sad
I miss the comfort in bein' sad
I miss the comfort in bein' sad
Ad, hey

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About

Genius Annotation

This song was inspired by Seattle-native Frances Farmer, an actor who was persecuted by the media due to her increasingly erratic behavior. She was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Kurt Cobain became fascinated with her after reading the 1978 biography Shadowland in high school.

Kurt and Courtney Love’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, is commonly thought to have been named after Farmer; however, it is well-established that she was actually named after Frances McKee from The Vaselines. Additionally, Courtney reportedly wore one of Farmer’s old dresses at the couple’s February 1992 wedding in Hawaii. It was said to have “dry rot” on it.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

What did Nirvana say about "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle"?
Genius Answer

Cobain spoke at length about Francis Farmer to Melody Maker in 1993:

KC: Well, you know, I’d read some books about her and I found her story interesting. She was a very confrontational person.

MM: Extremely confrontational. Selfish, maybe.

KC: That’s not what I got from the books I read. Actually, I did from two of the biographies I read about her, but there was one, ‘Shadowland’, the best one, written by this PI from Seattle who researched it for years, and I didn’t get that impression from that one. She was obviously a difficult person, and got more and more difficult as the years went on, as people started to fuck with her more and more.

I mean, she was institutionalised numerous times and, in the place in Washington where she ended up, the custodians had people lining up all the way through the halls, waiting to rape her. She’d been beaten up and brutally raped for years, every day. She didn’t even have clothes most of the time.

Courtney especially could relate to Frances Farmer. I made the comparison between the two. When I was reading the book, I realised that this could very well happen to Courtney if things kept going on. There’s only so much a person can take, you know?

I’ve been told by doctors and psychiatrists that public humiliation is one of the most extreme and hardest things to heal yourself from. It’s as bad as being brutally raped, or witnessing one of your parents murdered in front of your eyes or something like that. It just goes on and on, it grinds into you and it’s so personal.

And the Frances Farmer thing was a massive conspiracy involving the bourgeois and powerful people in Seattle, especially this one judge who still lives in Seattle to this day. He led this crusade to so humiliate her that she would go insane. In the beginning, she was hospitalized , totally against her will , and she wasn’t even crazy. She got picked up on a drunk driving charge and got committed you know. It was a very scary time to be confrontational.'

MM: Though nothing could excuse what was done to her, even the most reverent accounts of Farmer’s life don’t attempt to deny that she was [an] extremely difficult person, that her much-vaunted independence often amounted to a ruthless self-interest that left her indifferent to the suffering she caused. So she was no martyr. But Farmer “beautiful, arrogant, creative, destructive and destroyed” does appear impossibly glamorous, especially from the safe distance of a few decades. Is that what drew you to her?

KC: No. No, not at all

MM: The song, especially if Geffen have the good sense to release it as a single, may succeed in glamorising her. How would you feel about that?

KC: I’d feel bad about that. I just simply wanted to remind people of tragedies like that. It’s very real and it can happen. People can be driven insane, they can be given lobotomies and be committed and be put in jails for no reason. I mean, from being this glamorous, talented, well-respected movie star, she ended up being given a lobotomy and working in a Four Seasons restaurant.

And she hated the Hollywood scene, too, and was very vocal about it, so those people were involved in the conspiracy, too. I just wanted to remind people that it happened and it has happened forever.

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Recorded At
Pachyderm Studio, Canon Falls, MN
Release Date
September 21, 1993
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