July 12, 2013
Courtney Love, singer, songwriter, guitarist and front woman extraordinaire, is performing at the Grove of Anaheim on July 27.
“I have a lot of friends from OC. I went to rehab in OC once. It worked, too, good rehab. Over charged like crazy, though, Laguna. I always thought of the OC as part of L.A. really,” Love reminisced.
Love said the material they will be playing at each show will depend on “whatever strikes me that night.”
“This guy from the Boston paper told me Live Nation was advertising the concert like ‘Courtney Love Sings the Hits.’ I called the poor girl at Live Nation and chewed her head off!” Love chuckled. “I’m like, ‘have you seen what my audience is made of? It’s little girls and gay guys, and a few really smart dudes that aren’t going to see a death metal band that night.’ Sings the hits! I don’t even have quantifiable hits like that!”
“Although I’m really heartened today because I found out Queens of the Stone Age have the number one record in America, which is awesome and it’s on Matador, which if you’d have told me that ten years ago I would have laughed in your face!” Love continued. “If you’d have told me that a month ago I would have laughed in your face. I’m really impressed. It’s amazing. It’s kind of like a Subpop record getting to be number one. It’s crazy. But, I mean, it’ll last for 10 minutes. But it’s still cool.”
Love doesn’t play under her former band name “Hole,” any longer, but she has been performing with the current lineup, Micko Larkin (guitar), Shawn Dailey (bass), and Scott Lipps (drums) for a number of years. “Micko’s been with me as long as Eric’s (Erlandson/former Hole guitarist) been with me. He’s been with me 8 years. He’s an English-Irish lad,” Love mentioned. “And then Shawn’s been with me since ’09 and Scott’s been with me since 2011. Micko’s the one that I’m closest to and we do the most co-writing together.”
During rehearsals for the upcoming summer tour, OC Concert Guide caught up with Ms. Love for a quick chat.
OCCG: As a woman in rock, what significant changes for women have you seen in the music industry from when you first started to now?
CL: Shrinking. There’s not a lot of other women in rock, put it that way. Girls that play rock tend to know each other and there’s just not a lot of us. And it’s true. There’s a lot of duos. There’s a lot of girls that sing. But there’s not a lot of players.
OCCG: Personally, who would you still like to play music with, write a song or perform with?
CL: I don’t know. Probably, PJ Harvey, if she could go back to being a little more rock. I’d love to write a song for Marianne (Faithfull) because she doesn’t really write her own songs. She gets real neurotic about performing her own material. It’s just Marianne. I’d be really honored to write with Leonard Cohen. Nick Cave. I’m trying to think of super-genius younger people. I like the Arctic Monkeys a lot.
OCCG: What inspires you now to make music that is different from when you first started and what hasn’t changed in your music?
CL: What hasn’t changed is I’m still as ambitious as I’ve always been. I’m a little more mellow. You know what hasn’t changed is, I’m still writing about the same old shit. You know – sex, death, love, hate – same old shit everyone writes about. It’s just my take on it – rage, the economy. Nothing’s really changed. I’m just older. I have a guitar player that’s really well suited to me that I wish I’d been playing with the whole time. And a band I really love.
OCCG: Next year marks the 20-year anniversary of the album “Live Through This.” Are you considering anything special, a re-issue, a tour playing the album in its entirety, anything like that?
CL: No. I mean I’m not. Maybe some agent or manager or label will think of something like that.
The thing with this tour is that we have new material and there was supposed to be a new single to accompany it. The reason we’re not playing LA but we’re playing Anaheim, and smaller venues is because I have to wait for the first of the year. My book comes out at Christmas, and the single will come out probably as an album at that point because we’re very fast and we have 8 songs already recorded. But I can’t play the single live because then everyone would hear it already and you can’t just do that. You can’t just give the songs away straight up.
We have about 4 songs that are really, really, really excellent. Four songs that are really good. But the really excellent ones are the ones I want to play and I can’t. I mean I don’t do well unless I’m playing new material. I like to play old songs, too. It’s a little tour. It gets me out of the house. It gets you out of the house. It’ll be really fun. It’ll warm us up.
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