Music streaming service Spotify has announced Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” has seen a 1200% increase in streams since the release of The Batman, a film which heavily incorporates the moody acoustic grunge ballad.
Spotify unveiled the news via Twitter.
The streaming service specified the meteoric rise of the already-beloved track occurred since this past Sunday, a couple days after The Batman hit theaters Friday.
The song’s depressing tone, allusions to rain, and a seemingly-unfathomable obstacle have many parallels to the stormy Gotham City and its central protagonist, Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne, in The Batman.
In fact, director Matt Reeves has explicitly stated Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, a rock icon, was very much an inspiration for his interpretation of the Caped Crusader.
“He’s also got that Kurt Cobain thing, where he looks like a rock star, but you also feel like he could be a recluse,” the director said in an interview back in January.
In fact, Reeves routinely listened to “Something in the Way” while writing the script for the film early on.
The idea of Cobain being a recluse isn’t some pop culture myth, either. Last year, while promoting the 30th anniversary of the album Nevermind, which features “Something in the Way” as the penultimate track, bandmate Dave Grohl shared a story in which he attempted to describe the singer to his daughter (via Absolute Radio).
When “Come As You Are” played on the radio in the car, the Nirvana drummer’s daughter began singing along, and asked her dad what the blond-haired songwriter was really like.
“And I said ‘Well, he was very sweet. He was kind of shy, a little reserved, and could be sort of quiet,’” the Foo Fighters frontman said.
When the musician’s daughter asked whether Cobain was shy toward people he didn’t know or people he did know, Grohl said, “a little bit of both.”
The idea that a rock band frontman who can sing in front of hundreds of thousands of people could still be shy wowed Grohl’s daughter, whom he described as being “a little shy” herself.
“It was really cool because she was asking me about my life then because she wanted to understand it through the music,” he said.
The Batman is in theaters now. Studio 666, a horror/comedy film starring Grohl and Foo Fighters, is also in theaters now.
