Every so often, a songwriter receives a wave of inspiration from the muse that lets them pour an entire musical idea out onto a page (or, let’s say, an arm) in a matter of minutes—a rare and special experience Hole frontwoman Courtney Love had in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment when penning her dark, sardonic, and impassioned tribute to Kurt Cobain. At the time Love was scrawling lyrics on her limbs with a Sharpie marker, she and the Nirvana frontman were casually hooking up.
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Love wanted more than to be one of several women Cobain saw on a regular basis, and she managed to translate those feelings of anger, longing, love, and self-deprecation into a quintessentially 1990s grunge hit: “Doll Parts.”
Courtney Love Penned Her Kurt Cobain Tribute In 20 Minutes
“Doll Parts” quickly cemented itself as one of Hole’s signature tracks after its November 1994 release on their second studio album, Live Through This. The track encapsulates the concept of heartache over a romantic partner in a perfectly gritty, grunge way: I want to be the girl with the most cake / I love him so much, it just turns to hate / I fake it so real, I am beyond fake / and someday you will ache like I ache. The man on the receiving end of these biting lyrics was none other than Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, whom songwriter Courtney Love had been casually seeing at the time.
In an interview with the TV show Rage, Love described writing the song in under 20 minutes in music executive Joyce Linehan’s apartment bathroom. “I had to write most of the lyrics on my arm in Sharpie as I ran out of paper,” Love recalled in a now-deleted Instagram post, per Rolling Stone. “People were pounding on the door as I wrote it. It was played for the first time about an hour later at the Virgin megastore in Boston.”
Love continued, “It was about a boy whose band had just left town, who I’d been sleeping with, who I heard was sleeping with two other girls. It was my way of saying, ‘You’re a f***ing idiot if you don’t choose ME. Here is all the desire and fury and love that I feel for you. Good songs don’t always come in 20 minutes. But the force was strong, and that one did.”
A Tumultuous Romance Immortalized Through Their Music
If ever there were two star-crossed lovers of the 1990s grunge scene, it would unequivocally be Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and Hole frontwoman Courtney Love. Drug use, poor mental health, and the pressures of fame (including the unignorable competition between their two bands) all contributed to the tabloid hailstorm the two musicians endured during their short time together. Their divisive marriage would come to an end in 1994 when Kurt Cobain tragically took his own life in his Seattle home.
Unflattering narratives of either musician plagued their short relationship, and those stories became even worse after the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. Whatever their personal relationship dynamic was behind closed doors, their music serves as an endearing time capsule of their passionate highs and tumultuous lows.
Photo by Lindsay Brice/Getty Images
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