Courtney Love’s 10 favourite albums ever
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(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
1994 was a big year for Courtney Love, and not necessarily for great reasons.
Her husband, Kurt Cobain, with whom she had an infant daughter, passed away within weeks of her band, Hole, releasing their second album, Live Through This. How she found the time, energy and space to talk with Spin magazine not once, but twice within the next year is beyond me.
However, in a trademark example of her defiance, she did, and in doing so, Love gave a rundown of her top ten favourite albums of all time in addition to giving an interview about her image and her music. When revisiting the interview, it’s clear that Courtney Love is in a rough place – and understandably so.
This is where you find illuminating quotes like, “My reputation had gotten so bad that every time I went to a party, I was expected to burn the place down and knock out every window. So I would go into social situations and try my best to be really graceful and quiet and aloof. But sometimes when people are bearing down on you so hard, and want you to behave in a certain way, you just do it because you know you can.”
But what got her there? Well, when she spoke with the same magazine in 1995, Love named favourites like Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and PJ Harvey’s Dry, both of which can be seen in the likes of Live Through This, albeit on opposite proverbial edges of the record. As a musician, Love craves the cutting edge, the heart of the matter, but that doesn’t mean it has to be sonically straight-forward.
Nirvana’s In Utero sweeps just below the bottom of the list at number nine, perhaps because she was saving room near the top for her personal favourite of her late husband’s records. Nevermind sits at the number two spot, only edged out by Echo and the Bunnymen’s Heaven Up There.
These three records have a seismic connection to Love and her life, but they also encapsulate what she has always wanted to achieve with her own work. There’s a literary world created by the work, and she sees this as her “greatest legacy” when it comes to her own work. “I would hope that it’s a high bar for lyrics. It’s good to teach other people,” he told Arianna Phillips.
Continuing, “I was so completely influenced by Baudelaire. It’s pedestrian even to say Baudelaire in my generation, but kids don’t know. They don’t know Paul Paray. They don’t know Elsa Schiaparelli. They don’t know Joan Didion. They don’t know Susan Sontag. This is the shit you’ve gotta pass on to them. I would love to know that a kid read Balzac or Coleridge because I asked them to, or because I said something about it.”
Pixies and Leonard Cohen also made it onto her list, rounding out her taste well, once again establishing the link between angularity and artfulness. But above all, there is perhaps a distinct ‘honesty’ to her musical choices. This is something that abounds in all of the art she likes and that which she wishes to create.
As her simple advice to Lana Del Rey elucidated, “I don’t have a lot of advice because I haven’t done it, but I’m trying to do it. It’s so hard. I think the stuff you have to do is super plebeian. You’ve gotta to stay weird and you’ve gotta exercise. If you’re an addict or something – which I am – you’ve gotta pray.”
Stream a playlist of the records, below.
Courtney Love’s 10 favourite albums:
- The Downward Spiral – Nine Inch Nails
- In Utero – Nirvana
- New Day Rising – Husker Du
- Dry – PJ Harvey
- Songs From a Room – Leonard Cohen
- Superfuzz Bigmuff EP – Mudhoney
- Surfer Rosa – Pixies
- Fire of Love – Gun Club
- Nevermind – Nirvana
- Heaven Up Here – Echo and the Bunnymen
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