1994, may have provided a hint of Cobain's future musical direction. The record has drawn comparisons to R.E.M.'s 1992 release, Automatic for the People,[44] and in 1993, Cobain predicted that the next Nirvana album would be "pretty ethereal, acoustic, like R.E.M.'s last album".[42] Pat Smear stated in a 2013 interview that he also knew where Cobain's musical direction was headed, stating "I know where he was looking to go at that time. I think that he was looking to do the opposite of In Utero. Not polished, but soft. Not [as far as MTV Unplugged] but definitely less noise. I think he got, everybody got, their noisy stuff out of their system, really."[45]
"Yeah, he talked a lot about what direction he was heading in", Cobain's friend, R.E.M.'s lead singer Michael Stipe, told Newsweek in 1994. "I mean, I know what the next Nirvana recording was going to sound like. It was going to be very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments. It was going to be an amazing fucking record, and I'm a little bit angry at him for killing himself. He and I were going to record a trial run of the album, a demo tape. It was all set up. He had a plane ticket. He had a car picking him up. And at the last minute he called and said, 'I can't come.'" Stipe was chosen as the godfather of Cobain and Courtney Love's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.[46]
