The two REM songs Courtney Love thinks are about her: “We’ve been through fake-a-breakdown”
As budding grunge progenitors in Hole and Nirvana, respectively, Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain were deeply enamoured with the work of Michael Stipe and his trailblazing alt-rock outfit R.E.M. During their pre-fame years in the 1980s, Cobain and Love both idolised Stipe; little did they know, in a few short years, they’d befriend the ‘Radio Free Europe’ singer.
In the early 1990s, Cobain listed his all-time favourite albums. Among his 50 favourites was R.E.M.’s 1988 album, Green. “I don’t know how that band does what they do,” Cobain told the Rolling Stone editor David Fricke in 1994. “God, they’re the greatest. They’ve dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music.”
REM have rarely been given the grand stage they deserve. Though finding some fame with massive hits, the truth is, the group represented a truly alternative vision of rock music. Whether it was their penchant for sensitivity or Stipes’ often incomprehensible lyrics somehow managing to capture a universal theme, the group have found numerous admirers over the years with Cobain firmly among that list.
Following Nirvana’s rise to global fame with 1991’s Nevermind, Cobain and Love fell into the same circles as the REM crowd. “[Guitarist Peter Buck] moved to Seattle to start a family and bought a house, and Kurt and Courtney bought the house next door,” Stipe remembered in a SiriusXM interview in 2019.
Stipe soon befriended Cobain as a kindred spirit, but it was actually Love whom he had met first. “I remember Hole came through Athens, Georgia and played around the time of their first record,” Stipe said of the first time he met Love in a 1999 interview with the NME alongside the Hole singer.
“I was eating in a restaurant and these three people came up to me and introduced themselves,” he continued. “We started talking and they said, ‘We’re playing the 40 Watt Club tonight, come down if you want to’, and I didn’t think twice about it because they were really friendly people… They looked cool, the whole band, which is hard to do in Athens because everybody there looks cool,” Stipe reflected. “It’s hard to stand out and have a different look, and they looked great.”
The REM frontman then recalled getting inordinately inebriated before the Hole gig. “I proceeded then to get incredibly drunk… I don’t know why, I don’t know what was going on that night, but I got really drunk, and I stumbled down to the 40 Watt Club, and there were about 15 people there in the whole place, and it’s cavernous, huge. It’s Tuesday night, y’know, students were studying, nobody had ever heard of this band before. And I stood there, and I was completely blown away. And I think I told someone…”
The image of Stipe looking for a friend to understand the connection he felt with the group is another tableau most of us can align with. But he also tried to find Love to make a connection. “I didn’t reach you that night, did I?” Stipe added, turning to Love. “You were on the phone in the backroom the whole time, chatting with Kurt.”
This first interaction had occurred in 1991, during Hole’s second visit to play at the 40 Watt Club. Stipe met Love properly not long after while REM visited Seattle. “Then we were in Seattle making a record and Krist Novoselic and Shelley, his wife, threw a party and…” Stipe began, with Love interjecting, “Me and Kurt came over!”
Stipe maintained friendly ties with Cobain and Love up until the former’s tragic suicide in April 1994. As Cobain’s friend, Stipe felt remorse and suffered greatly from the loss. He channelled his emotions at the time into the REM song ‘Let Me In’. “The entire song is Kurt; it’s all about him,” Stipe once reflected. “It’s all about wanting so desperately to help someone who’s in such a dark place and feeling completely helpless, and feeling that hopelessness of ‘No matter how much I can offer of myself, it’s not going to be enough.'”
Following Cobain’s death, Stipe and Love remained friends. In an interview with Uncut in 2010, Love claimed that Stipe had written two songs about her, although REM has never confirmed this. “I know ‘Country Feedback’ and ‘Crush With Eyeliner’ are about me,” she said. “The line from Country Feedback: ‘We’ve been through fake-a-breakdown/ Self Hurt/Plastics, collections/ Self Help, self pain/ EST, psychics, fuck all,’ Michael [Stipe] talked me through that.”
Listen to ‘Country Feedback’ and ‘Crush With Eyeliner’ below.
