In 1991, Sonic Youth‘s Kim Gordon co-produced Hole‘s debut album. Pretty on the Inside was the first musical introduction to Courtney Love, who had a brief stint singing for Faith No More in the early 1980s and later appeared in small acting roles, including Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy in 1986 and Straight to Hell with The Clash‘s Joe Strummer in 1987.
‘Live Through This’
The album had moderate success, while Love began dating Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and gave birth to their daughter Frances Bean a year later. Within three years after Pretty on the Inside, Love, along with Hole co-founder and guitarist Eric Erlandson, started composing the band’s second offering, Live Through This.
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Released in 1994, the same year of Cobain’s death, Live Through This featured a number of top 20 hits, along with the band’s breakout single, “Doll Parts,” which peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.
The Meaning of “Doll Parts”
In a bathroom during a friend’s house party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Love said she wrote “Doll Parts” in 20 minutes.
“I had to write most of the lyrics on my arm in Sharpie as I ran out of paper,” shared Love in 2020. “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 recorded “Doll Parts” for the first time in November of 1991 for an acoustic performance on John Peel’s BBC show Peel Sessions and later admitted that the song leaned on some of the aches and pains she felt early on in her relationship with Cobain.
I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs
I am doll arms, big veins, dog beg
Yeah, they really want you
They really want you, they really do
Yeah, they really want you
They really want you and I do too
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
“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,” explained Love in an Instagram post in 2020. “It was my way of saying ‘You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t choose me, and here is all the desire and fury and love that I feel for you.’”
Love added “Good songs don’t always come in 20 minutes, but the force was strong and that one did. Anyway, I married that guy.”
Photo by Ken Mazur/WireImage
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