Blind Melon released the compilation Nico through Capitol Records on November 12, 1996. Named for singer Shannon Hoon’s daughter, Nico Blue, it gathered 13 tracks from demos, album outtakes and informal recordings following his death in 1995. The band had made two studio albums with Hoon, Blind Melon and Soup. There were still songs his bandmates wanted people to hear.
Work on the collection began two to three months after Hoon’s death. Guitarist Rogers Stevens told Billboard in October 1996 that the surviving members gathered recordings and added backing tracks, completing music their singer could no longer finish with them. Stevens emphasized that Hoon’s vocals were first takes, a quality he particularly valued in the material. The project depended on working with what Hoon had left behind, including recordings made far from a conventional album session.
Returning to those tapes also gave the musicians a reason to be in the same room. “I think we just needed to be together,” guitarist Christopher Thorn told whynow in a 2022 interview. He remembered the work as painful, but said being around his bandmates and sharing stories about Hoon helped. Even with the singer absent, Thorn said, working on the music could make him feel present.
The material reached back to the band’s beginnings. “Soul One,” an acoustic demo recorded in Los Angeles in 1991, came from the early recordings that helped Blind Melon secure their Capitol deal. Its place on Nico meant a song from before the debut album could sit alongside material from the band’s later work.
At the other end of that history were “Swallowed,” “Pull” and “Soup,” outtakes from the sessions for Soup. The song “Soup” hadn’t appeared on the album that shared its name. Even the familiar hit “No Rain” returned in a different form: the “Ripped Away Version,” drawn from a Netherlands television performance. The collection let listeners follow songs through stages of the band’s development that the two studio albums hadn’t included.
Some tracks preserved much smaller moments. “Life Ain’t So Shitty” originated in a hotel-room recording, while “Letters from a Porcupine” captured Hoon singing into Thorn’s answering machine. The latter became the closing track. Leaving that message at the end gave the album a particularly personal final sound: Hoon singing a song over the telephone.
Releasing the collection hadn’t been a foregone conclusion. In a March 1997 group telephone interview reported by the Arizona Daily Wildcat, Stevens said the band had questioned its decisions as the project developed. They waited to hear the finished result before deciding it should come out. He believed the album offered a fuller picture of Hoon and contained some of his strongest lyrics.
There was also a specific person the band wanted it to reach. Stevens said they named the record for Nico because they wanted her to know how much her father cared about her. “It’s almost as if it’s a gift from him to her, that he wasn’t able to give her in person,” he said.
