Easily the most polarizing personality in rock, Courtney Love nonetheless deserves some credit.

As frontwoman for Hole, she created some of the most boundary-pushing music of the alt-rock ’90s. Despite being a famous rock widow, she’s yet to sell out the legacy of her late husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain (or so she would say).

And as a woman, she’s never been afraid to speak her mind, even if it means at times coming across as the world’s most lucid train wreck.

Now, with a memoir reportedly on the way as well as a new album (and, according to some reports, a reality TV series – though we’ll believe it when we see it), Love is on tour to promote, well, Courtney.

The Vancouver Sun talked to Love the day after her 48th birthday. She plays the Commodore Ballroom on Monday.

Q: Happy belated birthday, by the way. What did you do?

A: Thanks. I went out with the man I’m dating. We went to The Met (art gallery) and the Carlyle (hotel, both in New York City) and then I went to record and work, and then I went out with my band, and my friend threw a party for me at the Electric Room, which I left really, really early. No cake because I’m on a diet. I have to walk in a runway show in Milan and my weight — I’m fine for rock but I’m a little chunky for fashion. I don’t eat that much but sometimes late at night I really have to have a grilled cheese sandwich. I drink a lot of coconut juice. I’m not really in this L.A. space where I want to do a raw diet thing. And I’m not exercising much at all. It was really quite a miracle when I went to the doctor. He called me in shock and said, “You have the lungs of a 28-year-old.” I said, a 28-year-old smoker? “No, a non-smoker.” And I was like, Wow. And my liver — I mean, I never drank, but I did a lot of other stuff. He was shocked. My liver enzymes were above normal in a positive way. I guess that’s something I find in common with a lot of people who do rock for a living. You have to have a really sturdy body.

Q: You’re not doing any new songs on this tour, are you?

A: This is supposed to be about a single we were going to release. But I feel like since (publisher) HarperCollins is making this (memoir) a big Christmas book, that we should release the single at Christmas. Which may seem like a long way away but the fact is that it has a much larger guarantee of success. There’s only been four alternative rock kind of, if you will, hits in the United States in the last year — QOTSA (note: she actually said “QOTSA”, not “Queens of the Stone Age”), Vampire Weekend, Fallout Boy, and one other one I can’t remember, three are on the same label. The majors have called me but what the hell do the majors want with me? They’re not going to spend any money. I’m not Hova (Jay-Z) and I’m not going to be delivering you millions and millions of kids on my Samsung mobile empire thing. The answer to your question is, I would love to be playing new material, but we aren’t. We’re looking at really deep cuts like Jennifer’s Body and How Dirty Girls Get Clean, songs I haven’t played for a thousand years, if at all.