Kurt Cobain was working on a solo album before he died, says writer of shitty new Kurt Cobain book

In the realm of "what if?" Kurt Cobain lore, it's been frequently speculated that the Nirvana frontman, if he had lived, likely would've broken up the band and pursued a solo career. One oft-told story involves a proposed collaboration with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe; it's also been suggested that if Nirvana had stayed together, its next album would've been along the lines of R.E.M.'s 1992 album Automatic For The People. Of course, this is all moot, because Kurt Cobain did, in fact, not live, so there's no real "new" musical direction to speak of.

Still, people continue to talk about how awesome the music Cobain never actually made totally is, including ex-Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, whose recent book Letters To Kurt is (to quote our own Jason Heller) "a junk heap of juvenile, Beat-aping, stream-of-consciousness twaddle, mixed with tedious egocentrism ironically dressed up as egolessness." Erlandson is in the midst of trying to sell this pile of yellow snow to the book-buying eskimos, and he's found a news hook: In a recent interview with Fuse TV, he claims that Cobain had already started work on a solo album at the time of his death. Erlandson says he even heard some of the songs, which he likens to The Beatles' White Album.

"That’s really what he was going towards, a solo album but working with different people," Erlandson said. "That’s why I was really sad [when he died]. I was like, ‘Oh man, not only are you cutting off a life, but a message to the world, a musical path is just left with … Bush and all this other stuff. He was cut short. Who knows where the music would have gone." Supposedly these songs were recorded, and "they may yet see the light of day." Though considering how much an unreleased Kurt Cobain album would be worth, it's a little odd that Eric Erlandson of all people is the one talking about it publicly 18 years later. [via The Hollywood Reporter]