Seven Days Later

Hole's "Live Through This" came out a week after Kurt Cobain's death and two months before bassist Kristen Pfaff's. UMe just remastered it for vinyl — overseen by the one member of that lineup still around to sign off on it.

On September 18, UMe put out a newly mastered 180g vinyl pressing of Hole's Live Through This, and the reissue was personally spearheaded by Eric Erlandson — the band's guitarist, co-writer, and co-founder, and the only person from that lineup still standing to oversee it.

Live Through This came out on April 12, 1994 — seven days after Kurt Cobain died, who was found dead in his Seattle home on April 8. The album's title, chosen before any of that happened, turned into something else entirely by the time anyone could buy it. Two months later, on June 16, 1994, Hole's bassist Kristen Pfaff was found dead of a heroin overdose in her Seattle apartment. Two deaths, in the same small circle, inside ten weeks of the record's release.

Cobain is on the album, uncredited — backing vocals on "Asking for It" and "Softer, Softest," recorded October 18, 1993, months before either death. That one true fact is the entire foundation of a conspiracy theory that has never fully gone away: that Cobain secretly wrote Live Through This, because, as the theory's proponents tend to put it, Courtney Love never made an album as good before or after. Rolling Stone's own 25th-anniversary piece on the record ran under the headline "How Courtney Love Proved Herself to the World." Proved it to whom, the headline doesn't say. It assumes you already know there was ever a case to answer.

Erlandson was the one who called this reissue in. Thirty-two years after he watched two of the record's other voices go quiet within ten weeks of each other, he's the one who had the record remastered and put back on shelves as a $40 piece of 180g vinyl. Nobody asked him what that took.