The two Nirvana songs Courtney Love was “competing with” on ‘Nobody’s Daughter’
Tragedy has always loomed large in Courtney Love’s life, to the point where her reputation often overshadows the music she created—especially in the eyes of many (male) music fans today. But in the grand scheme of things, this dismissal is insignificant. Those who truly know their music understand just how powerful her work was at its peak. Love has made her mark, secured her place, and now lives life on her own terms. And at the most basic level, the fact that she’s still here, standing tall after everything, is nothing short of a miracle.
Despite all that, it really is a shame that she’ll never quite get the respect she’s due. That said, if Dave Grohl himself could never truly escape comparisons to Saint Kurt, then Love was probably screwed from the start. That said, no one ever said that Cobain wrote the Foo Fighters albums after and probably not just because they were (most likely) inspired by his death.
The allegations that Cobain wrote large portions of Hole’s songs have persisted since the 1990s, fuelled in part by comments like Grohl’s on The Howard Stern Show, where he cast doubt on Courtney Love’s authorship of ‘Doll Parts’, a move that pulls into question his label as the “nicest man in rock”. But the reality of Love and Cobain’s musical relationship was far less conspiratorial. At its core, they simply inspired each other—a creative exchange between two artists who shared an intense connection, both personally and artistically.
And yes, I say “each other” with my entire chest. Take a cursory listen to Pretty on the Inside, then In Utero, and try to say that Cobain wasn’t aping his partner with the material. Sure, it’s one of the best records of the entire 1990s either, but that’s exactly what Cobain did. Remember how he said that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a Pixies rip?
The same was true with Love, too. Her ambition was for Hole to be on the same level as Fleetwood Mac, and she wasn’t interested in anything else. So when she saw her then-boyfriend achieve more or less exactly that with a single song, what she felt was… well, pride in the man she loved first and foremost. But a professional sense of rivalry wasn’t far behind.
During an interview with Fuse promoting Hole’s 2010 comeback album Nobody’s Daughter, Love talked about the feeling of watching genius at work. She says: “I was competing with Kurt’s sense of melodicism; I watched him write ‘Rape Me’ and ‘Dumb’ in 20 minutes, and it really pissed me off. I was living with a man who didn’t even like writing melodies; he wanted to paint!” Fittingly, the next step in Love’s evolution, to carry on the Fleetwood Mac comparison, was to attempt their Rumours.
That the one-two punch of Live Through This and Celebrity Skin get caught up in the mind-bending tragedy that preceded them distracts from the fact they are as strong a pairing of albums that anyone made that decade. By 2010, Love wasn’t just fighting back against a misogynistic rock scene that had tried to silence and discredit her, she was also fighting back against the last decade of her career and the misfire that was her 2004 solo debut America’s Sweetheart.
While Nobody’s Daughter didn’t make the same seismic impact as Love’s commercial peaks, it represented something far more significant. The album marked her return to form, giving her the space to regain control and focus on doing things entirely on her own terms. Drawing from the inspirations she’d gathered along her tumultuous journey, she crafted something meaningful—and long may she continue to carve her own path and create on her own terms.
