AyoDylan has only finished one book in his life. It’s a biography of Kurt Cobain, and he wrote the lead single from his new EP while reading it.”Aside from the occasional Green Eggs and Ham or adjacent, I have only ever read one book in my entire life,” he says. “Reading has been a struggle for me and until this past year, I had never read a book cover to cover. I made it my mission to force myself to accomplish that. The book I chose was an autobiography about Kurt Cobain. So the day I wrote that song, I was reading that book in the morning.”
The song is “Kurt Cobain (Play It Faster),” and the EP is “Knuckle Head,” out today. It’s the follow-up to his 2025 debut EP “Betty White,” which has crossed a million streams. “Knuckle Head” runs four tracks: “Chris Joslin,” “Jane from Breaking Bad,” “Her or the Guitar,” and the Cobain single.
The South Florida pop-punker pulls from late 90s and early 2000s pop-punk for the EP’s sound: fast tempos, big choruses, guitars pushed up front. The Cobain single sits at the front of that, built around the chorus “Pick it up and play it faster.” It’s a song about not being the best artist in the room and trying anyway.
“This song is about how there are much better and more accepted artists than me who I would like to be like,” AyoDylan says. “But accepting that I’m not like them and still trying to be the best artist that I can. The message is to pursue what you enjoy or are passionate about even if you’re not ‘the best.'”
The Cobain book is where the song’s specifics come from. AyoDylan talks about reading about Cobain living under a bridge and the hardships he faced, and the gap between that life and his own.
“I lived in a nice Townhouse with my brother and girlfriend at the time. I knew that I could never relate to the lifestyle of Kurt Cobain, but his words and songs resonated so deeply within me that I knew I would have to make it anyways despite people like Kurt being better artists than me.”
He’s clear that the version of Cobain he’s responding to might not be the real one. “I think as a whole, Kurt Cobain’s presence and reputation is so open to interpretation. He’s a story of pain and tragedy but he was also such a mystery. Every interview clip, book, or journal entry feels like you just found something special. A small peek into the most influential man in rock, who lived a private life. Because of the mystery, I feel like people fill in the blanks with themselves, and see Kurt almost as a friend who just gets them.”
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
The reason he picked the Cobain book as the first thing he’d actually finish came from that same projection. “I think the reason I chose a Kurt Cobain book as the first book I ever seriously read was because Nirvana already felt familiar to me emotionally before I knew anything real about Kurt as a person. I wasn’t looking for facts as much as I was looking for understanding. His music always felt honest in a way that most things didn’t.”
His own version of Cobain, pieced together from interviews, lyrics, and journal fragments, is specific: “someone deeply reflective and uncomfortable with the world around him, someone trying to stay authentic while everything around him became louder and more commercial. Whether that was fully true or not, that’s what resonated with me.”
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
That awareness keeps the song from sliding into tribute territory. “Reading about his struggles actually made me realize how different my life was from his. I wasn’t living under bridges or surviving the way he did. But weirdly, that made the song more honest. ‘Kurt Cobain’ became less about wanting to be him, and more about realizing that even though I could never fully relate to someone like that, music still mattered enough to me that I wanted to make something meaningful anyway.”
The rest of “Knuckle Head” was built with a specific listener in mind. “I realized that a lot of people listen to my music on the way to work in the morning. They use it as a sort of motivation to get them ready for their day. I wanted to design this EP to fit that,” AyoDylan says. “All of the songs are motivational in some way, telling people to follow their dreams no matter what. The songs are also super fast which always gets me more motivated. We urge people when they are listening to this EP to drive the speed limit and drive safe. But if these songs shave 6 minutes off the drive… it’s not the end of the world.”
AyoDylan’s social media has racked up over 50 million views in the past year. “Betty White” has crossed a million streams. “Knuckle Head” is out today.
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal 𝗈𝗋 SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
