Courtney Love has confirmed her first solo album in more than two decades is finally done, while opening up about the health crisis that nearly stopped it.
There is something very Courtney Love about announcing that you nearly died and, in the same breath, letting everyone know the record is finished.
After years of teasing her next solo album, Love checked in with fans on Instagram over the weekend with the fairly excellent news that, yes, it actually exists.
“It’s done. My record’s done,” she said. “It’s kind of been done. It’s a really good record. I put a lot into it.”
What followed was considerably heavier.
Love explained that after moving from Los Angeles to London in 2019, she became seriously ill, describing the experience in typically understated Courtney Love terms: her body “just exploded.”
She spent extended periods in hospital, lost her hair, dropped to around 100 pounds and was eventually told by doctors that she was going to die. She never disclosed exactly what the illness was.
Love, being Love, apparently didn’t accept that prognosis.
“When they said I was going to die, I just didn’t believe them,” she recalled. Somehow, she said, she got better. “I’m healthy, which is amazing.”
There’s a lot packed into that “somehow.”
Much of the album was made around that period, with Love saying she believed at the time that it could be the last record she ever made. So she decided to make the one she’d always wanted to make.
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Considering how long the thing has been gestating, she’s assembled a pretty serious group around it too. Michael Stipe, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong and Echo & the Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant are among the collaborators, alongside former Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur and producer Butch Walker.
The record will be Love’s first solo album since 2004’s America’s Sweetheart, although her last full-length was Hole’s Nobody’s Daughter in 2010, an album she now describes with the sort of perspective only time can give you.
It “flopped,” she said, before recalling the humbling experience of playing Pizza Hut Park at 11 in the morning while Limp Bizkit and Thirty Seconds to Mars sat further up the bill.
Twenty-odd years after America’s Sweetheart, there’s something genuinely good about hearing Love sound excited about music again.
There’s no release date or title yet. For now, she’s stepping away from social media for a few weeks to work out how exactly to roll the whole thing out. But touring is clearly on her mind.
“I want to tour more than anything, and I want to sing,” she wrote. “That’s what keeps my soul and body happy.”
After everything it apparently took to get this record here, seeing Courtney Love back onstage sounds pretty good to us.
