America’s Sweetheart by Courtney Love

America's Sweetheart, Courtney Love's first solo album, finally limped out on Virgin Records on February 10, 2004, and the story of how it got there is messier than anything on it. It was her first release since Hole fell apart, and she started it in Los Angeles in the summer of 2001, only for the sessions to be swamped by her drug problems, the fight over Nirvana's box set and legal wrangles with more than one record label. In the spring of 2003 she decamped to the south of France to record it all over again.

What came out, with Josh Abraham among the producers, heads somewhere quite different from Hole's three albums, both in sound and in what the songs are about, though Patty Schemel still pounds the drums and Emilie Autumn adds instruments and voice. "Mono" and its video were about the only promotion it got. Reviews were mixed, sales were poor, at 86,000 copies in three months, and Love herself later wrote it off as a mistake.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.