Episode
Melissa Auf der Maur on surviving the 90s and her big midlife resurrection
- Podcast
- The Shift with Sam Baker
- Published
- May 19, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3498
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/
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Summary
Today’s episode will take you ricocheting back to the 90s - in all the ways. Canadian singer, songwriter, photographer and producer Melissa Auf der Maur is best known as the bassist of Hole throughout the mid/late 90s, and consequently had a front row seat at the pillorying of Hole’s legendary front woman Courtney Love. As she puts it, ‘I watched society burn a woman at the stake’. For a few years, she was at the heart of two of the era’s biggest bands - moving from Hole to the Smashing Pumpkins - before releasing several solo albums. In 2007 she was named one of the 100 Greatest women in rock and roll, then she stepped away from the music scene when she had her daughter. It’s those years, the ‘fever dream of the 90s’ that Melissa revisits in her memoir, Even The Good Girls Will Cry - which takes us on a journey through the good, the bad and the ugly of what it meant to be a woman making music in the 90s. It will take you back, it will give you chills. It will make you cringe, it will make you rage. Melissa joined me from upstate new york to talk about her big midlife resurrection. what it cost to revisit those years of glamour and destruction, falling back in love with music in her 50s, discovering her redhead superpower, being an annoying mother, re-establishing joyful sisterhood with Courtney and reclaiming the innocence of the girl who started it all. As Melissa puts it, The Shift is real! * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Even The Good Girls Will Cry by Melissa Auf der Maur as well as the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by Sam Baker. * If you enjoyed this episode and…