Courtney Love, 2.0 (National Post)

She's cleaned up, gone celibate and produced a serious rock record. Is the singer really poised for a comeback?

"You can take me anywhere," Courtney Love says. Had she made this statement five or six years ago, when she was busy flashing David Letterman, stumbling into Pamela Anderson and getting arrested with startling frequency, it would have ranked as one of her more outlandish pronouncements. But now, post-rehab, and with a powerful comeback album to promote, she sounds lucid and strikingly intelligent; she might even be eminently presentable - if a little manic.

As she speaks, on the phone from Hollywood's Chateau Marmont hotel, she's simultaneously looking down at the swimming pool ("Matthew McConaughey's torso isn't the worst sight in the world"), doing leg lifts ("The one thing that doesn't look the same on me is my ass, and that's a tragedy, because I had a pretty majestic one") and poring over her laptop ("Yesterday Facebook referred my mother to be my friend. It's the first time I've had contact with her in 20-some years. I wrote, ‘This is actually funny,' and just sent her that. I didn't apply to be her friend or anything").

No surprise, then, that Love's new album is called Nobody's Daughter. It's being released under the name Hole -- although she's the only original member remaining from the seminal grunge-era band. Nonetheless, the moniker makes sense, marking the album as a balls-out rock project, as opposed to 2004's underbaked solo effort, America's Sweetheart. The production on Nobody's Daughter is punchier and the songwriting more confident, sometimes putting forth a surprisingly Dylanesque swagger. Throughout, Love sings with a visceral, almost scary, intensity.

In order to keep her "chi" during the long writing and recording process, she says, "I disentangled from anything romantic, from anything sexual in my life. I was like Morrissey ... it was bananas. I would say it was more about romance and/or giving power away to men on any level than it was about sexuality. ‘No one's getting a piece of me but that microphone' -- that was my motto."

For someone who has been nearly as famed for the male company she's kept (including her marriage to Kurt Cobain and her four-year relationship with Edward Norton) as for her music, this is a surprising declaration. But her celibacy followed America's Sweetheart's disastrous promotional period, after which she bottomed out, entering court-ordered rehab from crack cocaine.

Her friend, songwriter/producer Linda Perry, gave her an acoustic guitar, and Love began writing about issues such as vengeance and survival -- issues which she avoided, she says, on her last album of note, Hole's Celebrity Skin (1998).

By contrast, Nobody's Daughter gazes unflinchingly into the void, and returns with defiance. On the title track, Love spits, "Don't tell me I have lost / When clearly I have won." "I love singing that lyric!" she shouts down the line. "The mythologies about me are so epic and there are so many of them, yet the reality is an unbelievably great story -- the younger part. But the last 12 years, I haven't given you guys anything to write about in terms of product, so I'm the most picked-on chick in the world."

Indeed, it feels as though Love has never been away -- mainly because of a continued stream of outrageous statements made by her or about her. She has vowed to start self-editing: "There's a difference between candor and honesty, and you don't always have to be candid with people." Apparently she's no longer preoccupied by her financial issues, which she previously discussed at length with every journalist who would listen: "We all lose fuckin' fortunes," she shrugs. "I've moved through it." And two months ago, she says, she even started "shirking" her much-vaunted Twitter feed, a font of celebrity gossip. That said, several hours after the interview, she fires off eight rapid-fire Tweets, some tagging the trending topic "GeniusQuotesOfCourtneyLove."

It's difficult to separate Love's mythology from reality, and she admittedly colludes in this. But there's no question that for her conviction, talent, and perseverance, Love has been an inspiration. "Apparently I dragged every single female English major and art major through college in this country," she says, "and some males too."

On the album's gut-wrenching closer, Never Go Hungry, Love belts out, "It's time for me to take a stand / It's time for me to be a man." The self-described alpha female seeks to claw back a degree of power which she feels has been denied her. "I sang it with a lot of resentment," she says. The song's title borrows from the same Gone with the Wind monologue from which she garnered the title of Hole's 1994 breakthrough album, Live Through This. Love quotes Scarlett O'Hara, over the phone, with relish: "She falls to her knees and starts eating dirt, and looks up at the gods, and says, ‘As god is my witness, I will live through this. I will live through this, and I will never go hungry again!'"

Again, she's mythologizing herself -- O'Hara was a widow who became an eminently resourceful, successful and self-sacrificing businesswoman. Perhaps, now that Love is apparently clean, none of these things are beyond her. One can't imagine her, like O'Hara, wearing black all the time and refusing to attend parties. And yet in any case, she asserts, her social life shouldn't be up for so much scrutiny.

"I'm not a clown and I'm not a freak," she says. "I'm a dignified and grateful and forbearing woman, and I'm a virtuous and very honest woman. I've done some amoral, crazy s--t, but I've given y'all a record, and I think it's time for y'all to leave me alone in terms of my private life. I'd like to maybe have one."

(National Post)