Courtney Love says the album she wrote in and out of hospital is finally finished: 'I almost died'
Courtney Love spent Friday evening, August 15, answering the question her fans have been sending her for years. "A lot of you asking on my record is at," she said in a video posted to Instagram. "It's done. It's kind of been done. It's a really good record."
Butch Walker, Will Sergeant, Billie Joe Armstrong and Melissa Auf Der Maur are on it. It has no title. It has no release date. By her own account it has been sitting finished for a while, which is an odd place for a record to sit.
Then she said what making it cost her.
She gives no cause, no year and no diagnosis, and we are not going to guess at one. What she does give is the working method, and it is the most telling line in the whole video: "I was in the hospital mostly but when I wasn't, all I did was write and record it."
Is "done" a real word this time
Her last solo album was America's Sweetheart, in 2004. Twenty-two years is long enough that a new Courtney Love record stopped being a product and became a rumour, and long enough that "it's done" arrives pre-loaded with everyone's doubt.
I believe her, and the distinction that decides it is small but real. She did not describe a plan. She described an object: four collaborators by name, a stretch of work with a beginning and an end, a finished thing she has lived with long enough to have an opinion about. Plans slip. Objects only need somebody to put a date on them.
That is also the caveat. Done and out are not the same word. With no title and no release date, the album currently exists for her and for nobody else. Interested is the right posture. Booked is not.
The comparison she cannot win
Whatever this turns out to be, every single review of it will name Live Through This by the second paragraph. That is not fair to a new record and it is going to happen anyway, so here is the honest answer: no, it will not stand next to that album. Almost nothing does, including most of the albums made by the people who were in the room for it.
The good version of this story is not a sequel. It is a record that sounds like someone who wrote in the gaps between hospital stays and had nothing to prove to a twenty-two year old comparison. If it reminds you of 1994, she has lost. If it makes 1994 sound like one chapter, she has won.
If you want to be in the argument when this thing finally lands, put the actual album back in your ears first, not your memory of it.
Put on Live Through This and listen for one specific thing: how much melody is buried under the noise. It gets filed as a rage record, and the rage is right there, but the songs underneath are built like pop songs, with choruses that arrive earlier than you expect and hooks that survive being screamed. "Violet" does the whole trick in three minutes, quiet verse into a chorus that detonates. "Doll Parts" holds back the volume until the last thirty seconds and then lets it go. "Miss World" is a perfectly ordinary sad melody sung by someone shredding her own voice on purpose.
That tension, a tune and a wreck happening at once, is the thing to hold onto. It is the standard the new one will be judged by, and it is also the reason a comeback is worth wanting at all.
