Courtney Love has reflected on her long-running frustration with being compared to the late Marianne Faithfull, saying the two artists “hated” the constant parallels drawn between them.
Speaking in a recent interview with The Times, Courtney explained that she and Swinging Sixties icon Marianne — who died in January 2025 at age 78 — shared mutual respect but rejected the idea that they were cut from the same cloth.
She described Marianne as “an intellectual,” noting that the singer immersed herself in works like Dante’s Inferno, while Courtney joked that she preferred “a cheap thrill and a Beatles hook.”
She said: “Marianne was an intellectual and I am not.
“She read Dante’s Inferno and I like a cheap thrill and a Beatles hook. But I remember her saying, ‘They wanted me broken!’ I know from experience: she’s not wrong.”
The pair first crossed paths at an “all-ages gay disco” in Portland, Oregon.
Kurt Cobain’s widow recounted: “The two big albums were [David] Bowie’s Scary Monsters and Broken English.
“There was one song where she said the word ‘c***,’ which I thought was cool as f***.”
Hole singer Courtney, 61, also recalled discovering Marianne’s music early in her career and how it shaped her creatively, even as the public continued to link them through their turbulent histories and rock‑and‑roll mythology.
She said: “I saw Marianne Faithfull sing Times Square in New York, 1988.
“I couldn’t concentrate because Sally Grossman, the woman on the cover of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, was sitting next to me, but anyway here’s this woman who comes back from being ‘ruined’ playing an incredible show with her co-writer Barry Reynolds, who she was clearly having an affair with. And well, it was incredible.”
It’s not the first time Courtney has addressed the “ridiculous” comparisons.
While revealing how they connected via a mutual friend, the late Star Wars legend Carrie Fisher, in a joint interview with Marianne for the Los Angeles Times in 2021, she recounted: “We did a few things together, you, me and Carrie.
“Marianne and I are weirdly connected. [But] we can’t stand being compared to each other. It’s ridiculous.”