don't have any feelings" in the song. In a 2021 Los Angeles Times interview, Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, called "Something in the Way" "one of the great rock songs of all time," and described it as Cobain "clawing his way out...He's telling himself anything just to get through." Love cited the line, "It's OK to eat fish cause they don't have any feelings" as the one that affected her the most deeply, saying, "He knows it's a lie — here's a guy who loved turtles — but he thinks that if someone just loves him enough, then maybe, just maybe one day he will become real." In regards to the song's fictionalized aspects, Love said that "the place [Cobain] writes from is so emotionally desperate we all understand it." Possible co-authorship According to American musician Nick Oliveri, some of the song's lyrics were contributed by Mark Lanegan, vocalist of Seattle rock band Screaming Trees, who later joined the band in which Oliveri played bass, Queens of the Stone Age, as second vocalist. In the 2023 book Lanegan, Oliveri recalled that “Mark said he wrote some lyrics on ‘Something In The Way’ with Kurt on ‘Nevermind’. But Kurt had played on some of Mark’s solo stuff, ‘The Winding Sheet’. “So, instead of getting paid, they just did this thing where, ‘Hey man, I added a lyric on your song and you added a lyric on my song. Let’s just call it even." Oliveri told author Greg Prato that he remembered Lanegan "kicking himself in the butt a little bit about that" later on, knowing that "he would have had a lot of money" if he had been credited as the song's co-author. Release and reception In 2015, Rolling Stone listed the song at number five on their ranking of 102 Nirvana songs. In 2019, The Guardian placed it at number 12 in their list of Nirvana's 20 greatest songs. In 2017, to mark what would have been Cobain's 50th birthday, the Phonographic Performance Limited released a list of the 20 most played Nirvana songs on the TV and radio in the UK, in which "Something in the Way" was ranked at number 17. Posthumous chart success In August 2020, the song reached number two on Billboards US Rock Digital Songs Sales chart, number five on their US Alternative Digital Songs Sales chart, and number 45 on their all-genre Digital Song Sales