Doll Parts

Hole frontwoman Courtney Love revealed in a 2020 Instagram post that she wrote "Doll Parts" in 20 minutes while in the bathroom at a friend's house party in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "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," she explained. "It was my way of saying 'You're a f---ing idiot if you don't choose ME, and here is all the desire and fury and love that I feel for you.'" "Good songs don't always come in 20 minutes but the force was strong and that one did," she added. "Anyway, I married that guy." The guy she's talking about is Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.

Courtney Love wrote this song in 1991 shortly after meeting Kurt Cobain; she recorded it for the first time in November that year in an acoustic performance for John Peel's show on the BBC (this version can be heard on the 1995 Ask For It EP). Hole didn't release the song on an album until Live Through This was issued in April 1994, a week after Kurt Cobain died and two months before their bass player, Krista Pfaff, died of a drug overdose. The song took on a new meaning after these losses.

In an interview with the August 2010 edition of Uncut magazine, Courtney Love said of this song: "I still don't understand why that one song with just three chords is such a big thing. But it's definitely got some good lyrics. That was a song about Kurt. I wrote it in Boston. So the line 'dog beg,' that's because there was a dog begging me for food."