Love: People come here from all over to make L.A. records.

Auf Der Maur: Yeah, but I never in my life would have made an L.A. record if I hadn't hooked up with you. So I'm learning about it as it's going.

Erlandson: L.A.'s inhabited by people who aren't from here.

ATN: Came from somewhere else.

Love: But you're an L.A. lady...

Erlandson: They come here and they learn to get into the thing. They learn about it.

ATN: They come with what they think it is, bring their own thing to it.

Erlandson: Yeah, there's probably a lot of people that were in classic L.A. bands that never were from here and that got into the vibe.

Auf Der Maur: They just soak it up in another way, less consciously or whatever, but I'm bringing the north....

Love: But you bring in Quebec, you bring in Leonard, you bring in that great French-Canadian thing, which is epic in itself.

Erlandson: That's the good thing about this record -- it has the North in it.

Love: It has a lot of North.

Erlandson: It's nice. It's an L.A. record without being too Jimmy Buffett or something, I don't know, too L.A.

Love: Too Chocolate Watchband.

ATN: Do you think that Celebrity Skin is Hole's Hotel California?

Love: Yes, that's the point. Hotel California on fire. That's it. This is what it is. This is Hotel California on fire. We were gonna call the picture that.

Auf Der Maur: Reconstructing it.

Love: Good call.

ATN: Let's start with the song "Celebrity Skin." What inspired that? What was going on when it was written?

Love: It was about 7 or 8 at night and we didn't turn on the lights. We were at S.I.R. studio in Hollywood on Sunset. And it was ...

Erlandson: We were sitting around ... we wanted to write a trashy L.A. rock song.

Love: No, it was me, you and Billy Corgan. It was during our 12 days with Billy Corgan. And Melissa wasn't there that day for her Billy lesson, which she's probably happy she skipped.

Erlandson: And we always wanted to call a song "Celebrity Skin" because of this band from like, 1989, when we were ...

Love: It had been a wasteland for me, though, for years. I'd been writing pages and pages of a poem called "Celebrity Skin." Because it was so evocative.

Erlandson: Kind of an 'ode to that era' kind of thing.

Love: That's the title. From there on it's mine. It was really dusky out. It was summer. We had just finished writing something, "Hit So Hard." And Billy said, "What do you wanna write about now?" Or Eric said, "What do you wanna write about now?" And I said, "I wanna write about Los Angeles." And they both said, "You always wanna write about Los Angeles!"

I'm like, "Let's just write it really quick, really quick." So, totally unrelated to anything that I might ever compose, these two wrote a riff that went [sings], which no self-respecting female would ever write. It's so cheesy. And I was like, "Melissa, it has to be the first single." She was like "Ewww." I'm like, "I know, but as soon as we get to the bridge, it's really good!" It's good. Boys like it. People think it's great. It's a burlesque. Did you ever see "Cabaret"? It's like the first song Joel Grey sings. "Welcome!"