• This song is about the actual kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl. In 1987, she was returning from a concert in Tacoma, Washington when she was abducted by a man named Gerald Friend. He took her back to his mobile home and raped her. The girl, whose name was not released, was tortured with a whip, a razor, and a blowtorch. She managed to escape when Friend took her for a ride and stopped for gas. He was arrested and sent to jail.
• The version of this song that ended up on the album Nevermind was recorded in Madison, Wisconsin at the studio owned by their producer, Butch Vig. These sessions took place in April 1990, and while pieces of these recordings made it on to the album, the recording of "Polly" was the only one that made it on in its entirety (most of what ended up on the album was recorded with Vig at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California in April 1991).
• The recording features Cobain playing a five-string Stella guitar that he said he purchased from a pawn shop for $20. "I didn't bother changing the strings," Cobain told in a 1992 Guitar World interview. "It barely stays in tune. In fact, I had to use duct tape to hold the tuning keys in place." Vig remembers that the guitar's "strings were so old they didn't have any tone to them. A real plunky sound."
• The drummer on this song is not Dave Grohl, but Chad Channing, who was with the band from 1988-1990. In 2013 Chad Channing explained: "I never even realized that 'Polly,' that version, was from the Madison sessions that made it on Nevermind. I mean, it was, I don't know, almost ten years down the road before someone mentioned that to me. I was like, 'Really?' And I listened to it, I said, 'Okay, that makes sense.'
• Nirvana had been playing this for a while before it was released on Nevermind. They recorded it in 1989 in sessions for an Extended Play album called Blew, and an early performance appears on the live album From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah.
• The song was first performed live on June 23, 1989, at Rhino Records in Westwood, California. The last live performance of "Polly" was at Nirvana's final concert, at Terminal 1 in Munich, Germany, on March 1, 1994.
• After hearing this song Bob Dylan was prompted to remark of Cobain, "That kid has heart."
• There's a point in the song where Cobain sings only "Polly says..." before pausing and starting over. This was a mistake in the studio that the band as well as the recording team liked, and left on the album. As evidenced in live performances, the mistake was "written in" to the song.
• Cobain wrote about an incident, which occurred after the song's original release on Nevermind, in the liner notes to Incesticide: "Last year, a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song 'Polly.' I have a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience."
• This song is an example of Kurt Cobain writing from the perspective of another person - in this case a very unsavory one. While many of his songs seem very personal, he explained that he liked to write about other people and events, as he thought his life was "boring."
• Nirvana played some benefits to help rape victims, including the "Rock Against Rape" concert in 1993, which raised money for a women's self-defense organization.
• Originally titled "Hitchhiker" and later "Cracker," "Polly" dates back to at least 1988. The earliest known version is a home demo featuring Cobain on vocals and guitar.
• The song is composed in the key of E Minor, while Cobain's vocal range spans one octave and one note, from a low of D3 to a high of E4. The song has a basic sequence of Em–G5–D–C5 in the verses, and D–C5–G–B♭5 during the refrain as its chord progression.

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