Courtney Love has spoken candidly about a Courtney Love 2019 illness that she says nearly cost her her life, revealing the health crisis shaped the new album she has finally confirmed is complete. The disclosure came via an Instagram video in which Love gave fans their most detailed update yet on a record years in the making, her first new work since Hole’s 2010 LP Nobody’s Daughter.
Courtney Love 2019 illness: ‘They told me I was going to die’
‘I went to England in 2019, and when I went there, my body just exploded,’ Love recalled in the clip. ‘I lost all my hair. I was about 100 pounds. And they told me I was going to die. I didn’t believe them.’ Her account points to a protracted medical episode that, by her telling, was as serious as it gets. This is not the first time Love has gestured toward the seriousness of that period: Yahoo News Canada reported in 2021 that she revealed she had ‘almost died’ the year prior from anemia, lending the new account an earlier, partial glimpse into how severe those years were for her health.
What is striking in the Instagram video is how Love connects the experience to a childhood psychology she has carried all her life. ‘I never really lost my ability to see that fucking red was red, despite them telling me that red was blue,’ she said. ‘And so when they said I was going to die, I just didn’t believe them. And somehow I got better. I’m healthy, which is amazing.’
That refusal, she explained, is bound up in a childhood pattern of what she called ‘pattern interrupt[ing] the adults.’ The habit shaped how she processed the diagnosis, and she said those memories directly fed into the new record. ‘They’d say red was blue, and then I’d see blue. But blue was blue. So I’d gaslight myself that maybe they were right, and red was blue…and my head would explode.’ It is a raw, unguarded explanation for an album that has been gestating for the better part of a decade and a half.
Album confirmed done, with an impressive list of collaborators
On the music itself, Love confirmed the album is ‘done’, and thanked a number of collaborators who contributed to it: Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Echo and the Bunnymen’s Will Sargent, and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. That is a line-up with serious indie and post-punk pedigree, and it suggests the record has been built with some care and intention rather than rushed to capitalise on a moment.
‘When I made it, I believed this was my last record so I made the record I always wanted to make,’ Love wrote. The weight of that admission is hard to separate from the health scare context she provided alongside it: if she believed she was making a final statement, it goes some way to explaining the long gestation and the apparent emotional intensity behind the project.
Love stopped short of announcing a release date or a title, but she did signal her appetite to get back out on the road. ‘I want to tour more than anything, and I want to sing. That’s what keeps my soul and body happy.’ After years largely away from the live circuit, it reads less like a throwaway marketing line and more like a genuine statement of intent from someone who has been through it.
Away from the album, Love’s recent activity has included a series of Geese covers and a central role in the documentary Antiheroine, which premiered at Sundance in January. Her Instagram post closed with a note of gratitude to fans: ‘Thank you for giving me the grace I need to prepare how to enter the world again.’ For anyone who has followed her career through Hole’s imperial phase, through Celebrity Skin and beyond, as covered in depth by Pitchfork, that line lands with some force. Whatever this album turns out to be, it has been paid for in full.
