Linda Perry and Billy Corgan were drafted in at an early stage to produce and co-write for the project which became known as How Dirty Girls Get Clean (again evoking the idea of rehabilitation and redemption key to Love’s new found sobriety) with bluesy singer-songwriter compositions sounding like Stevie Nicks, Patti Smith, and Bob Dylan as heard on many of the demos leaked over the intervening years. In 2007 Love was gearing up to release the album as a follow-up to her much maligned solo outing America’s Sweetheart (2003) created from the fiery hell which was Love’s drug addiction and general emotional landslide. She released a documentary in late 2006 called The Return of Courtney Love in which she showcased many of her new songs and also released a book,
Dirty Blonde, a sort of decoupage of journals, Polaroids, poetry, song lyrics, and other personal miscellanea. The album however never materialised and many fans at that point thought it would not see the light of day as Love further procrastinated over it.
Things took a sudden turn for the better when she met guitarist Micko Larkin (of one time band Larrikin Love – never heard of them either) who revitalised the project and started to write with Love. Suddenly new songs began to emerge and old songs were rebuilt and reupholstered as the album was finally given a concrete release date under her old band name, Hole, rather than being a follow-up to America’s Sweetheart (2004). Many might balk at the idea of Hole with only one original member, but in actual fact the line-up of the band changed considerably throughout the nineties as band members overdosed on drugs or simply left. When Melissa Auf der Maur said her goodbyes in 1999 to focus on a solo career Hole crawled along with just Love and Eric Erlandson, releasing the dreadful single Be A Man in 2000 before crashing and burning. In any case, Micko Larkin is the perfect foil for Love and is more than a decent substitute for Erlandson in one of Hole’s best albums since Celebrity Skin (1998).
The first five songs on the album are some of the best of Love’s career. Title track Nobody’s Daughter, having changed considerably with Micko Larkin’s input, is a plaintive guitar number with no discernible chorus but is not the poorer for it. This brooding, introspective song finds Love trying to work out some demon, a demon which goes largely unnamed but could be her husband’s death (the lead singer of Nirvana committed suicide in 1993), her long battle with drugs, her destructive relationship with her mother and father, or the recent loss of her daughter after a custody battle with Kurt’s mother. Though in some incubus-like way she seems to be eating from this misery for her music; “It’s glorious, its terrible, god I need it/It’s beautiful it’s ravenous; I’ll just feed it”. First single Skinny Little Bitch is a punky rock number Hole are renowned for, a caustic guitar-led song in which Love lyrically assassinates an unknown woman; “Born of foul creation/Born of sour milk/Cocaine filth”. In some ways it’s a follow-up to Teenage Whore (1991) and worthy of the early Hole canon.
Honey is another of the new songs written with Micko Larkin, a rock ballad much in the mode of Hole’s acclaimed song Northern Star. Acoustic and electric guitars underpin the painful howl of Love’s voice as she asks her husband
“Why I’m not good enough to save you from destruction?” before declaring in the refrain “He goes down, down to his bitter end/He knows now, now you can’t touch him” as though she has made some kind of peace with herself over his death. Pacific Coast Highway again concerns her husband, a West Coast-infused rock song much in the vein of another Celebrity Skin song, Malibu. Bolstered by Billy Corgan’s ear for a good melody, this song is one of the highlights of the album. The opening line, “I knew a boy, he came from the sea/He was the only boy who ever knew the truth about me”, reveals the tenderness Love still feels for Cobain, though the sinister line “I’m on the Pacific Coast Highway/With your gun in my hands” will do nothing for the rumours that Love was responsible for her husband’s death, as documented in Nick Broomfield’s controversial documentary Kurt and Courtney (1998).
Samantha, like Skinny Little Bitch, is a visceral guitar-strewn number in which Love viciously deconstructs another female subject, a prostitute, who remains unnamed. With Corgan and Linda Perry, this melodic song contains much of the sonic venom of songs like Violet and Gutless, with a bold, vampiric refrain “People like you fuck people like me/in order to avoid suffering” being one of the best she has ever written. Someone Else’s Bed is the beginning of a slightly weaker set of songs that could have come from the America’s Sweetheart sessions. A string quartet attempts to add emotional gravitas to a song ostensibly about her doomed relationship with Steve Coogan, which is just about saved by its poetic refrain, “Sunday morning when the rain begins to fall”. For Once In Your Life is one of the songs which was actually better in its demo form than on this over-meddled, over-produced, speeded-up album version. The original had a bluesy, plaintive, Marianne Faithful vibe which has now been lost with Micko Larkin’s middle-eight bafflingly replacing the gorgeous harmony-led middle-eight “It’s all I am” in the original, which is a sad loss indeed.
The Linda Perry-penned song Letter To God has been cynically dismissed by some music critics as being ‘the money song’, the one guaranteed to help the album sell by the bucket load. In fact it is a decent rock ballad which encapsulates the struggles of Love’s past five years, though some will feel uncomfortable by its blatant commercial edge and its being the only song which doesn’t feature Love’s unmistakable lyric writing (apart from the brilliant ‘I never wanted to be some kind of comic relief’ line). Loser Dust is perhaps the weakest song on this set, recalling the mindless rock of But Julian, I’m a Little Bit Older Than You, I’ll Do Anything and Zeplin Song of America’s Sweetheart as Love berates an ex for being covered in ‘loser dust’, whatever that is. How Dirty Girls Get Clean is a relentless manifesto to Love’s post-drug clean up, given weight on this version with heavy guitars and drums, and quickly revives the sagging fortunes of the album.
It closes with Never Go Hungry, perhaps the one song that has stayed closest to its original acoustic demo. It is also one of the first songs Love wrote on release from her stint in rehab. It is an indication of the direction the album was initially going in and in some ways the loss of that lost album is palpable. It is one of the most personal songs on the album as Love describes the moment she hit rock bottom with a long, long crawl out of the hole; “It’s a long way back from where I’ve fallen down/It’s a very hard fall, it’s a very cruel town/And my dress is torn and I got no jewels” before closing with the proclamation; “And my phoenix she rises/She is sure to descend/She will never go hungry, go hungry again”. It is a fitting way to end an album as it tells the story of the entire process of putting it together. And what of the losses of the album of which there are a rumoured 18 other songs written during its gestation? Car Crash, My Bedroom Walls, Sunset Marquis, and Happy Ending Story are probably the best songs not to make it, although the latter is an iTunes bonus track.
Nobody’s Daughter is Courtney Love’s most personal and most tortuous album re-establishing her as one of the most compelling women in rock. So many are preoccupied with her tabloid antics and brash behaviour that they forget the erudite, intelligent woman underneath it all. Rock music is all the richer for having this self-proclaimed ‘alpha women’ giving men a run for their money and the truth is there is no current male equivalent in rock today making the kind of personal, visceral, and powerful rock she has staked a claim on.
