Courtney Love Names Lana Del Rey and Kurt Cobain 'True Musical Geniuses'

Upon mentioning her opening performance for Lana Del Rey, Love went on a laudatory tangent about Lana as one of the greatest musicians since Kurt Cobain — whom Courtney Love knows personally. Honorable mentions for musical geniuses she isn’t close with went to U2’s Bono and R.E.M’s Michael Stipe.

Related | You Can Finally Call Yourself a Lana Del Rey Scholar

Love’s criteria rested on their ability to “Speilberg anything,” citing Lana Del Rey’s feminized recitation of Ginsberg’s spoken word poem “Howl” and Kurt Cobain’s cover of Meat Puppet’s “Plateau.”

Love also apparently played a role in Lana Del Rey’s 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell by putting Lana on to Joni Mitchell. We’ll forgive Lana the slight of not knowing one of the greatest folk singers and instead offer eternal gratitude to Love for going out and buying every Joni Mitchell record she could find in Portland, Oregon (which is many, many records) for Lana to listen to.

As for Love’s own music, she’s been staying up to date, listening to UK drill which she said is “almost like Joy Division do gangster rap,” and finalizing her first album in 12 years. Love did not share much about the non-rock twelve-song LP, but she did go into what didn’t make the cut, namely a two-minute-twenty-four second “earworm and a half” of a song titled “Justice for Kurt.”

With noncommittal promises to share the song as a single after the album’s release, Love argued the song would “swallow the entire narrative of the album” and that she’d had enough of Kurt Cobain ruining her career aspirations.

Fondly granting him the title “Kurt the Ruiner,” Love shared how her relationship with the idolized singer has gotten in her way since his tragic death. Namely, she missed out on playing Marla in Fight Club after cussing Brad Pitt out for not letting him play Kurt Cobain in a biopic. And for that: we thank her for her service.

But ahead of her venture back into music, Love is curbing her outbursts and practicing radical forgiveness. She assured Maron she's "not mad at anyone” and said she came out on the other side of spiritual rebirth after giving herself anemia from only eating ice cream and cheese during her Xanax in LA phase.

The hour-long podcast is a testament that Courtney Love is one-of-a-kind and somehow also just like the rest of us.

Photo courtesy of BFA/ Sancho Scott